I See Mycelium / I Hear the Sound of Breaking Glass Georgette Brown
I See Mycelium / I Hear the Sound of Breaking Glass
Georgette Brown
Saturday 11 December 2021 — Saturday 19 February 2022
Rāhoroi 11 Tīhema – Rāhoroi 19 Pēpuere 2021
I See Mycelium / I Hear the Sound of Breaking Glass is a multi-media love letter to fungi and mycelium by Georgette Brown. In this new body of work, Georgette playfully and poetically explores her lifelong connection to mushrooms through various media, with special attention given to the ways in which looking for mushrooms and meditating upon mycelium networks pull her out of spirals time and time again. Featuring stained glass, video, poetry, sculptural works, and a painting, Georgette invites the viewer to step into the microcosm she has created. In this exhibition, she is joined by her sibling Cello Forrester who has made a sound work, You Hear the Sound of Breaking Glass, to accompany the video work. Together, Cello and Georgette have written a collaborative poem that lives within the video work.
Georgette likes to go into the forest and look for mushrooms, sometimes for culinary purposes, but mostly to just behold. When she is in the forest, she likes to imagine she is a tiny bug, experiencing a complex and abundant world. She contemplates the colours, spikes, curves, gills, pores, and veils. She also likes to break colourful glass and fuse it back together in patterns reminiscent of mycelium networks. She conducts these activities to navigate her daily journeys of anxiety, and finds the deep connectivity residing just below our feet in the soil very comforting.
Mycelium is the vegetive part of a fungus, consisting of thread-like hyphae, a network-like structure that branches in every direction. Georgette's latest body of work speaks to this subject matter: the ever-branching, spiralling, sprawling nature of mycelium. Drawing on the concept of “mycoremediation”, a term used to talk about the potential fungi has for decontamination, Georgette considers what potentials lie here, in “My / core / remediation”. As the poem reflects: “Core, as in, the heart of something. And remediation, to remedy. How it was that in the forest I came to remedy my heart.”
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Georgette Brown is a Pōneke Wellington-based artist and musician. She attributes much of her art practice to her formative years, spent living deep within a eucalyptus forest in Australia. Over the past few years, Georgette has exhibited at a range of artist-run and project spaces around the country, including Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Neo Gracie, Satchi Saatchi & Saatchi, Window, MEANWHILE, Play_station, and Blue Oyster Art Project Space. Georgette has a BFA from Massey University Wellington and plays drums in WOMB, a band composed of her and her two siblings.
Image:
I was looking for the colour orange.
I was looking for the colour blue.
I was looking for the colour purple. 2021, Georgette Brown, stained glass. Photo courtesy of the artist.
