Convergences: Artist talk with Marta Ferracin 2024

Participants will learn about the environmental role lichens play as bioindicators of air quality and ways to converge into a common ground between the living and the artificial through human and other-than-human site-specific responses.

The artist will take you through three different aspects of the exhibition. Starting in the courtyard, you will experience the hybrid companionship between lichens and a human-made woven polyester canvas, and between the lichenised biocanvas and human intervention. In the foyer gallery space, the artist will show how to merge the micro and macro dimensions of lichens, drawing on interwoven biodiversity and artist embroidery narratives. The talk will conclude at the core of the gallery, where the audience will be taken into an immersive and interactive experience and from spectators will become activators of the overall Convergences sentient environment.

About the artist

Marta Ferracin is an Italian born, Sydney based contemporary multimedia artist whose practice merges art, science and technology. Driven by an interest in ephemeral natural phenomena and material agency, she seeks to engender embodied experiences and heightened sensory responses to biological and artificial living habitats and microhabitats. By stimulating a phenomenological synthesis of life and living Ferracin encourages an actively sentient environment awareness.

She connects and works with nature to enhance psychological wellbeing and, in turn, foster biodiversity through a mutually beneficial approach to coexistence.

This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from a seasoned professional and connect with fellow art enthusiasts. Don't miss out on this unique event!

Marta Ferracin, Hybrid (detail), 2024, lichens growing on the assembled bio-canvas