Chantelle Mitchell (VIC) and Jaxon Waterhouse (NT) are long term collaborators, working together as Ecological Gyre Theory, a multidisciplinary artistic research project.
This project manifests as curatorial practice, experimental writing, sculptural and installation practice and academic research.
In 2023, Chantelle and Jaxon were the Monash University Art, Design and Architecture Gallery Curators in Residence, presenting three exhibitions and a series of programs with Australian and international artists in consideration of concepts drawn from the theoretical frameworks of anthropologist Tim Ingold. They have published widely across contemporary theory and ecology.
Together, they were co-directors of Ordinance, a contemporary arts space in Narrm.
Ecological Gyre Theory operates as both object of study and method of study, one reflective to our current critical context. In presenting our theory we work across, around and into contemporary ecological and Anthropocene discourse to reframe possibilities of knowing and being within a vortextual frame. Located within wet/sea ontologies, the gyre is volumetric space, a vessel for reworlding and, in a Guattarian fashion, transversalising between epistemologies. As a methodology, ecological gyre theory endorses volumetric thought within a tidalectic view, as terrestrial fixity/dialectics is countered by whorling forces that both enable and produce destabilised possibilities of being. Further, we propose it as a way to make sense of and work within that which remains, eddies, flows and whorls amidst continued acceleration and destabilisation.
EGT has been presented in various forms at the following:
‘Ecological Gyre Theory: vortextual thinking after the ecological turn’, conference paper, ANU Humanities Research Centre Annual Conference, December 2019.
‘Ecological Gyre Theory’, WRITING&CONCEPTS lecture series, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2020.