CHIMERAS, 2022-2024
Lamarck always speaks of environments (milieux) in the plural, and by this he explicitly means fluids like water, air and light. When Lamarck wants to designate the set of actions exerted on the living being from outside, that is to say, what we today call the environment, he never says environment, but always “influencing circumstances”.
Georges Canguillem, from The Living Being and its Environment
Chimeras is a photographic series of botanical works made in the age of climate change, or as some scientists now call it, the Pyrocene. The works depict existent individual botanical specimens ‘hybridised’ with other species: these new species do not exist. They are - after a Borges title - ‘imaginary beings’.
Within Homer’s Illiad, the “chimera” originally depicted “in the fore part a lion, in the hinder a serpent, and in the midst a goat, breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire”. In biology, however, a chimera designates an organism of different genetic tissues; in the field of genetics, chimera describes interspecies hybrids.
The series employs techniques borrowed from nineteenth century portraiture photography, twentieth century photography botanical (e.g. Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Robert Mapplethorpe), and twentieth century cinematic visual devices, such as rear projection and green screens. Equally, references from dioramas, early nineteenth century botanical/zoological illustration (such as Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora, Ernst Haeckel, and Ferdinand Bauer) and science-fiction (Lars von Trier’s film, Melancolia; Douglas Trumble’s Silent Running) appear alongside those from art history.
Explicit in the growing environmental crisis, the series depicts these new species in landscapes of fires, caves, wasted and denuded forests, and smoke-laden canyons and jungles. While the works are atemporal, each work suggests some form of extreme environmental and genetic alteration or mutation.
This work was assisted with a 2023 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship.
