Co-comissioned by Institute of Modern Art and Tarrawarra Biennial, to the curve of you was a series of sonic and relational artworks focused on the movement and connections of plants, people and microbes. The project experimented with gardening, foraging, fermenting, and flower essences as embodied processes that can both celebrate and disrupt values, histories, and feelings related to the cultivation and care of land.
The first iteration of the project took place at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and was unique to the urban context of the gallery and to plants that are ‘wild’ and medicinal within the city environment. A selection of displaced plants that survive on disturbed and untended land were planted with existing plants in the IMA garden. The garden acted as a space for public events that sought to enliven the senses and encourage conversations on systems of classification, ethics of care, and the impacts of colonialism on traditional ecological knowledge. In the gallery, the sounding of seeds and vibrations of a flower essence offered an encounter with Achira—a plant originating from Peru that has been called by many other names across continents. Defying classification, Achira is to be noticed and respected. The following text has been taken from the exhibition catalogue essay written by curator Tulleah Pearce.
Revelations 2021
to the curve of you developed through a research-based process where Caitlin attempted to holistically come to know the properties and uses of Achira. She began by contacting Leticia Guevarra, a Quechua medicine woman in Peru, to learn about the significance of the plant in its place of origin and the traditional knowledge connected to it—pampach’i (as it is known in Quechua) is used for healing, both humans and the earth.
This conversation was documented by Caitlin and expanded on in a transoceanic exchange with Camila Marambio, Chilean curator and founder of eco-feminist research collective Ensayos. It appeared in to the curve of you as part of a poster-publication entitled Revelations, a collection of texts that trace the accrual of knowledge and continued searching throughout this project. Through her exchanges with Camila, Caitlin’s texts become increasingly poetic, mirroring the shifts of her research as she moved from empirical knowledge into the more intuitive modes encouraged by Achira.
vitality becomes you 2021
Inside the galleries, to the curve of you consisted of an installation in two parts. In the first half of the divided gallery, vials of flower essence line the wall surrounding a handblown glass flask created with glass artist Jarred Wright. This flask contained vitality becomes you, the mother essence of Achira that was ‘charged’ at the harvest site by Caitlin and mindbody healer, Annie Meredith. Flower essences work on an energetic level to bring about subtle changes in emotional and attitudinal states. Visitors were invited to take a vial to put on their wrist pulse points to encounter Achira through their own experience and perception.
Essence meets essence 2021
A dandelion yellow wall lead into the second room where custom-built instruments sat on bespoke stands with canna seeds resting on their taut skins and nailed surface. This space was bathed in a strong red light and multi-channel audio of field recordings intermingled with the rhythmic percussive waves of the seeds-on-skin. These instruments were periodically activated by performers to create a live meditative score that merges aqueous bodies of plants, insects, mycelium, microbes, and humans.
to the curve of you (Achira) 2021
For this project, the IMA courtyard garden was replanted by Caitlin and gardener Kate Wall. Their intention was to bring in species that, like Achira, have many applications but are often overlooked or undervalued. Pink baby’s breath, false dandelion, sword ferns, and blue heliotrope all intermingled amongst the native and naturalised plants that remain from Céline Condorelli’s Corps à Corps installation. The new introductions to the garden worked to enrich the soil and bolster the health of the pre-existing vegetation and they hold various medicinal or nutritional values. These properties, along with the ethical responsibilities of working with ‘weeds’, were explored in a series of garden tours, discussions, and workshops that unfolded throughout the exhibition dates.
to the curve of you (TarraWarra) 2021
The second iteration of the project was exhibited as part of Tarawarra Biennale 2021: Slow Moving Waters curated by Nina Miall. Featuring twenty-five artists from across the country, the TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters responded to two related cues: the idea of slowness, and the gentle, measured flow of the nearby Birrarung (Yarra River). The exhibition’s title comes from the translation of the local Woiwurrung word ‘tarrawarra’, after which the Museum, and its surrounding area of Wurundjeri Country in the Yarra Valley are named.
The outcome of another residency, Caitlin Franzmann’s experiential sound work to the curve of you (TarraWarra) (2021) shares [Yasmin] Smith’s interest in the enmeshed ecologies of TarraWarra and in collaborations that connect local people to each other and to the land they inhabit. Interestingly, both Smith and Franzmann are among a growing number of artists choosing to live primarily outside metropolitan areas, often pursuing itinerant modes of working which foreground a proximity and responsiveness to site. Against the global’s insistence on mass exchange and circulation, their integrated approach to work/life signifies a restored preoccupation with the intimacies of the local, while at the same time refraining from the susceptibility of slow thinking to retreat into a mode of pre-urban pastoral romanticisation. Rather, by focusing on the abundant multiplicity and ecological interconnection of their immediate environment, these artists attempt to remedy the widespread degradation of local events and exchanges that is taking place today.
Working with collaborators across disciplines and with the particularities of site, Caitlin Franzmann’s participatory works develop around slow practices, conversation, critical listening, and collective forms of care. Bringing together material and immaterial forms, to the curve of you (TarraWarra) proceeds from a sculptural installation of foraged, fermented and preserved foods in the gallery space to take in the surrounding grounds of TarraWarra. Within the gallery, reformed laboratory glassware houses live cultures such as kombucha and plant matter foraged from the local area, a sensory prompt for an intimate audio experience that is accessed via a QR code on the work’s wall label. As a voice guides visitors out of the gallery and walks them around the Estate, objective accounts of the ancient practices of cultivation and fermentation give way to more discursive reflections on cellular ecologies, borders, and the intricate microbial relations between humans and their environment. Traversing biology, agriculture, history, mythology, philosophy and Indigenous cultural knowledge specific to TarraWarra, Franzmann’s guided walk encourages the slow practices of dwelling in, and aligning with, place: walking, observing, conversing, listening, growing, foraging, tasting, feeling and fermenting. Weaving connections between the microbiomes of soil, plants and humans - networks that can be physically sensed through sight, smell, taste and vibration - Franzmann opens up a space that is dynamic, fluid and, for the most part, invisible. to the curve of you (TarraWarra) unearths the microscopic cultures of TarraWarra, drawing on the simple activity of a guided walk to extend attention to the cellular level, to those essential cycles of decay and transformation that sustain all life.
leaning in to the curve of you 2021
leaning in to the curve of you (2021) involved intimate guided walks around the grounds of TarraWarra Museum of Art as a part of TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters curated by Nina Miall. Caitlin shared stories of the microbial relations between plants, soil and people specific to the site and ritual offerings of grape kombucha and a vibrational essence blend of moss, lichen, self heal and flatweed from the region.
weed walk
As a part of Slow Art Day, visitors were invited to join avid forager and food gardener, Doris Pozzi, and artist, Caitlin Franzmann, for a one hour guided weed walk around the grounds of the Museum. While walking, they discussed the healing properties and possible uses of plants that have been deemed ‘unwanted’ along the edge of the lake and within the rolling lawns, along with the values that underpin such classifications. The event raised questions: How do we work with weeds responsibly? What are the plants telling us—about the soil, about the climate, about history? How do we listen?
Collaborator
Doris Pozzi has been an avid forager and food gardener most of her life, starting out in an Italian household in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs and more recently moving to a small acreage forest garden in the beautiful Yarra Valley. As her passion for edible weeds developed Doris found herself doing more and more research to discover the range of weeds available locally, their properties and ways of preparing them in the kitchen. Her books Edible Weeds and Garden Plants of Melbourne and Wild Mushrooms – The Beginner’s Foraging Guide grew out of that interest.
