Andesite: 9 December 2020 – 30 January 2021
Bosse & Baum, London

The exploitation of the earth gives birth to two children: the widow Annie Kelly, raising her children in a tent in 19th-century Aoteroa New Zealand, and, beneath the ground, the blind god Adoh, whose hundred unseeing eyes are witness to a dark future.

Andesite is set at the threshold between these two worlds: the mythical subterranean city of Selvaga, in which organic technologies are manufactured, promising reprieve from ecological crisis; and the real, ancestral story of Annie Kelly, Austin’s great-great-grandmother. The works in Andesite continue a conversation with the dead, opening up the psychic and earthy spaces of extractive industry, colonial settlement, and matrilineal communion.

In Selvaga, floppy machines harness the energy of Alset, the rider who moves through time and slips between zones. Ehusea is a figure of technological sacrifice, vulnerable yet protective, aggressively reaching towards a post-carbon future. Andesite does not resolve the question of whether the disaster has already occurred: the fragile products of human ingenuity are in permanent conflict with geological scales and processes.

The works in the exhibition emerge from a series of experimental practices and a body of research that have opened a form of ancestral dialogue within which new narratives, histories, protagonists and landscapes - real and imagined - coalesce. Spanning sculpture, installation, drawing and performance - and incorporating materials linked to specific sites and histories: volcanic black sand, obsidian, opals, turban shells, silicone, plastics & ground glass - the works trace stories that depict diverse forms of relatedness that cut against dominant approaches to landscape, environment and kinship found in patriarchal Western societies. Andesite is haunted by figures that raise urgent questions about care and responsibility, reimagining the nature and limits of the familial and expanding them to include a network of human and non-human agents.

Text by Miriam Austin and Boris Jardine