Ecological Gyre Theory
Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse
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.
︎︎︎ ecologicalgyretheory@gmail.com
Interstellar Return
Art, Death & Disposal
Death Tech Research Group
University of Melbourne, Naarm
Interstellar Return, which operates as an investigation, presentation and documentation of a more-than-human (re)performance. Developed over a period of 12 months, Interstellar Return has seen us employ the services of an interstellar funereal service in returning a meteorite to space. The resultant exhibition brings together ephemera, documentation and recontextualised material in an investigation of mourning, flight and transit, read across frames of human and more-than-human matter and mattering. In reckoning with quantum entanglement and shared matter through the cosmic and lithic, we performed a funeral service for our meteorite, acknowledging the agential nature of the geologic, and matter within and beyond our Earthly frames. In doing so, we enter into a theoretical space which presents anew the vibrancy of matter, extending an ethics of care beyond the frame of the human, and toward the afterlife.
This work was developed for the exhibition Art, Death & Disposal, supported by the Death Tech Research Team, in response to the provocation: how might disposal of the deceased be designed in the 21st century? Imagining beyond burial and cremation – in a world of rapid social, technological and environmental change – seven artists respond to this question, presenting moving and provocative new work.
