Lumpen Falls

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'Lumpen Falls' was a collaborative project by artist collective Open Spatial Workshop OSW (Bianca Hester, Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell). OSW was formed in 2002 to explore notions of materiality and time within creative spatial practice. 'Lumpen Falls' extends this investigation into the dynamics of matter and matter's capacity to convey an immeasurable quality of events. 'Lumpen Falls' was curated by Conical director Adrien Allen. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: While drawing from the field of New Materiality 'Lumpen Falls' references past works by Italian artists Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-). The work challenges arts engagement with materiality through seeking to position matter as more than a mere carrier of meaning. In this re-imagining of matter-space-time relations matter takes on a productive, formative quality that privileges the productive potential present within all material. 'Lumpen Falls' extends art beyond its anthropomorphic preoccupations and in doing so it opens itself to the unknown. By inhabiting the incalculable qualities of matter, its excess beyond the knowable, art practices produce a context for the maximisation of difference. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: This work was shown in Conical, a gallery supported by Arts Victoria (Arts Development: Programming) and the Australia Council for the Arts (via VACB: ARI & OYEA Grants). Further peer review is demonstrated by reviews in The Saturday Age (Life & Style, page 7, March 10, 2012) and an article by Catherine Clover for online journal Das Platforms Emerging & Contemporary Art. The work was also the site and focus of a public lecture (Conical, March 9, 2012) by artist Terri Bird and theorist Jon Roffe, a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow and author of 'Badiou's Deleuze' (2011).