What we are made of will make something else

Penelope Aitken and Jutta Pryor (with Marc Zegans and Evgeny Pustota)

Loft 275
Ivanhoe Library and Cultural Hub
275 Upper Heidelberg Rd, Ivanhoe, Vic

23 April - 16 May 2021

Considering state change and metamorphosis, the works in this exhibition embody chaos and compost through painting, video, poetry and sound. In dark reflexive paintings, Penelope Aitken uses ink brewed from plants to reflect on the nature of nature. Video artist Jutta Pryor offers an interpretation of the divergence of fabricated systems.

”As a general concept, ‘What we are made of will make something else’ has been fermenting for several years my mind especially since visiting sites in Sweden where Eighteenth Century Enlightenment naturalist Carl Linnaeus formulated his influential taxonomic systems used to describe matter.  In the spirit of evolution, I invited projection artist and filmmaker, Jutta Pryor to participate in an incarnation of this project at Loft 275.“

Reflecting on reincarnation, rust, decay and new life, the paintings in this exhibition are informed by history, religion, botany, taxonomy and poetry.  I imagine all these things being thrown into a simmering pot or a dark compost heap to see what issues from the brew. Included in here are the thoughts of early botanists and natural philosophers from Lucretius to Linnaeus and a big dollop of John Milton. I am attracted to significant moments of transition in history or when two distinct cultures meet, and where competing belief systems are allowed to joust. These pictures often begin as depictions of plants, lichens and fungi which then incorporate slightly supernatural elements. I magnify microscopic features of mould or enhance the pareidolic eyes that seem to watch from woodgrain and mosses. 

As well as conventional paint, I use ink brewed from plants and ash - in some cases from plants I collected from the Swedish gardens and trails of Enlightenment naturalist Carl Linnaeus, and Villa Diodati, the 1816 holiday home on Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein. I burnt these samples to bring home safely to Australia.

Flirting with the experiments, hypotheses and suppositions of science, these works aim less at discovery, in favour of ‘unknowing’, as they abstract their initial subjects, and become visually less literal and substantially more self-referential.

I have said a lot more about all this here >