Phoenix Melting- Preliminary Research

This work was primarily inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chtulecene. I considered the fluidity that all life has, I was specifically interested in the notion of tentacular thinking: embracing the muddled curiosity entangled in the natural world. A phoenix is mythological yet recognizable, what happens when we disrupt the narrative of a phoenix rising from the ashes? This project was an exploration of recontextualizing elements, blurring the boundaries between nature and humans. I froze these elemental cocktails consisting of: beet juice, chlorophyll, photo fragments, dead roses, laundry detergent, cigarette ashes, lettuce, leaves, cloud ear fungus, and water of course. I allowed for chance, and individual agency to guide the forms of these forms and mixtures that would never naturally occur, an exaggeration of nature's capacity, frozen yet fleeting in the inevitable ephemeral conditions of ice. These phoenix vessels, that are amorphous and could be interpreted as many other creatures, are tropes of Haraway’s concept of ecological narratives, that are filled with nuance, imagination and unpredictable futures. Haraway’s text is concerned with grappling with what it means to live in the present. Working with ice felt like a natural response to capturing the impossible quest of attaining the present, while letting the present exist authentically, the idea of being earthbound.

 

This is a process photo of one of the iterations of the ice phoenix upon being removed from the silicone mould I created.

Done