ISADORA VAUGHAN GAIA, NOT THE GODDESS - 2 MARCH - 23 JUNE 2019
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ISADORA VAUGHAN GAIA, NOT THE GODDESS 2 MARCH – 23 JUNE 2019 © 2019 Heide Museum of Modern Art. This material may be downloaded, copied, used and communicated free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes provided all acknowledgements are retained. Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019 Photograph: Christian Capurro
This education resource is designed to support students of VCE Studio Arts:
Unit 3, Outcome 3
On completion of this unit the student should be able to examine the practice of at least two artists, with
reference to two artworks by each artist, referencing the different historical and cultural context of each
artwork.
To achieve this outcome students will draw on key knowledge and key skills outlined in Area of Study 3.
Key knowledge
art practices related to artworks in more than one historical and/or cultural context
artworks from different historical and/or cultural contexts that reflect the artists’ interpretations
of subject matter and influences
the use of art elements and art principles to demonstrate aesthetic qualities and communicate
ideas and meaning
the materials, techniques and processes used in the production of the artworks
a range of recognised historical and contemporary artworks.
Key skills
analyse ways in which artworks reflect artists’ interpretations of subject matter, influences,
cultural and historical contexts and the communication of ideas and meanings
analyse and discuss ways in which artists use materials, techniques and processes
analyse the ways in which artists use art elements and art principles to demonstrate aesthetic
qualities
research and discuss art practices in relation to particular recognised historical and contemporary
artworks.
This resource will also support students in their Unit 4 studies.
Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery Through the Project Gallery program, Heide supports emerging contemporary artists by assisting them to make new work and to extend their practice at a formative stage in their career. Project Gallery exhibitions offer Heide’s audiences insights into leading-edge art practices. Art + Climate = Change 2019 Gaia Not the Goddess has also been programmed as part of the 2019 Climarte festival; a socially engaged festival of climate change related arts and ideas featuring curated exhibitions and theatre works alongside a series of keynote lectures, events and public forums featuring local and international guests. Artist Biography Isadora Vaughan was born in 1987, and graduated with honours from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2013. She is represented by Station Gallery, Melbourne, and currently has a studio at Gertrude Contemporary in Preston. Primarily working in sculpture, Vaughan experiments with the geological, temporal, associative and emotional qualities of materials. Her works emerge out of a process of exploring states of matter and a desire to personalise, dislocate and disrupt traditional material hierarchies. Curator Biography Brooke Babington is an artist, writer and curator. Exploring power and social dynamics, her work engages with ideas of ideology, the mythology of the artist and language. Brooke completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2010 and also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art History and Curatorship, Honours) from the Australian National University with internships at the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003-2006).
Installation Gaia Not the Goddess is one installation comprised of eleven discrete elements: 1. ceramic paper clay and vitrified crushed rock x4 forms 2. mycelium x2 forms 3. Mt. Gambier limestone boulder, glazed ceramic, epoxy 4. unrefined beeswax and steel, vegan pig’s ear 5. hemp and lime 6. thermoplastic 7. bitumen
In conversation with Isadora Vaughan - Artist I make sculptures using a wide variety of materials and techniques. I’m interested in working with different skillsets that are perhaps traditionally more male-dominated, and sometimes prohibitive ideas and realities that could potentially stop people from engaging with materials that we find in our everyday lives. I think that working with materials is very similar to learning to cook. It’s about combining lots of different ingredients and seeing what happens. It’s important to me to incorporate elements of risk and chance, which is why I often work with more volatile materials, especially in terms of their temporality and ephemerality; materials that will change over time. It’s important to me to make sculpture that isn’t considered final, permanent or timeless. I’m more interested in the way that the climate, culture and intentions toward the environment, materials and art shift over time and the effects this can have materially, as well as the ways in which we engage with the materials. These ideas can be influenced by the current political climate, ideas about what materials are safe and unsafe, what is natural or unnatural. In this show, I am working with materials that are initially seen more as natural rather than synthetic. My intention, especially with the mushrooms, is to be working with materials and responding to some agency outside of my original contention. That comes in many different forms. I’m an avid Radio National listener, I have it on all the time. I started listening to a podcast called Gaia, not the goddess. Sometimes I think Radio National kind of inadvertently directs my entire arts practice without my conscious attention. It talked about Gaia theory, which is a scientific hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock, an independent scientist and futurist, whose theories concerned the interconnectedness of the earth and all of its systems. He worked with Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist who refined his ideas of the interconnectedness of materials, to eventually develop the Gaia Theory in the 1970s. The word Gaia is also the name of the Greek goddess of the earth and the word has been co-opted by a range of people with a range of more mystical and less scientific interests, but this podcast made a point of not talking about that ancient Greek aspect of the name. That’s what appeals to me, in that it was using the feminine as an affirmative and refused the regressive stereotypes of a 'divine feminine’ that likens women to goddesses. These stereotypes are negative because they associate women with values of intuition, emotion, nurture and community as opposed to, for instance, rational thought. I recall Donna Haraway’s well-known treatise The Cyborg Manifesto, about technology and the future. This essay ends with the statement ‘I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’ It’s a way of thinking about how we think about women. Is it better to think of them as cyborgs or as goddesses? It talks about feminism and ecology and I guess a kind of future-forward thinking, as opposed to a historical, mythological idea of femininity. So for me, when I thought about the title of the podcast invoked a really pivotal text, in terms of art and ideas. Haraway’s ideas of the interconnectedness of the ecological world had a real potency that I could use to name my work. I started working with beeswax and, over time, have learnt a lot about it materially; extending the form by working with various apiarists. Beeswax is becoming increasingly scarce, as bee populations shrink around the world. As a material, it is getting harder to source beeswax and it is becoming more expensive as a result. In the last few years it’s gone from being $2-3 per kilo to $40-50 per kilo. For honey production, a certain amount of beeswax in the hive is essential. It’s also become fashionable because people are using it for alternative food storage products. So these market forces impact it as a material. Because it is a natural material, various factors impact on the colour of the beeswax, which then impacts it as a sculptural material. As I was making my work in beeswax, one panel at a time, each time I would need to source more wax it would be a radically different colour. That was something I could have tried to control by being more discerning or choosy, but because of the cost and the scarcity of the material and because, to me, that variation is like a signal of beeswax as a natural material, in this instance I decided to embrace the difference in the work. It provides an example of the material itself having some agency in determining my process. It’s important to me to develop a certain ethic or rationale, but it’s also important and quite
rewarding to be responsive and flexible. Rather than having an over-arching, absolute ideal of making
perfect, exact sculptures, by adapting to the conditions of the materials I can make more interesting and
engaging work.
Gaia not the Goddess, 2018, process image; beeswax in mould.
Several of the forms in this work play with ideas of being above ground and below ground. The form made
from beeswax was made by pouring wax into a mould. So on one side of the form you can see the steel
support structure within it and the wax is completely flat. The other side is much softer, more swollen
and undulating, and refers to forms in nature and in the body. It’s the fleshier interior underside, which
could also be seen as the bottom of a riverbed. The form itself was loosely derived from looking at the
way water travels along the ground, following paths of least resistance. That led me to making the moulds,
and developed into making five panels and joining them together.
In Gaia Not the Goddess, I put down a surface of bitumen, across the whole gallery floor. On the floor are
a series of sculptures, made of several distinctly different materials. I hope that through the installation
process, they will come together to form one whole work. So I’m not seeing the show as ten works, but
rather as one work comprised of different parts. One thing I should mention is that I am learning, and I
purposefully work with things that I don’t understand. I gain some understanding and hopefully some
dexterity in the way that I use them, but I make no claim to be a scientist or expert. Through my own
processes, I find a certain kind of language. There are things that interest me about materials but perhaps
even someone who works in that field wouldn’t find interesting. I would like to provide viewers with the
chance to perhaps re-see something that they might see all the time. Obviously bitumen is something we
see on a daily basis and it’s something that I’ve long had a desire to work with. In this exhibition, I wanted
to create a field for the sculptures to exist within, almost like they’re all in the same bowl of water.
Something that quite literally interconnects them and touches everything. I needed to find something
that would have both an ability to be solid and not need pathways to walk through, because access is an
issue that’s really important in the museum. I needed something that wasn’t going to be trackable, or
kicked around as it was walked across. Bitumen was an ideal material because of where it comes from
and its use historically in land art.
Bitumen (also known as asphalt) is a mixture of aggregate, which is crushed rock and pitch - the scum or
waste material when crude oil is refined to make petroleum. Geologists prefer to use the term bitumen
to refer to the naturally occurring variety and asphalt to refer to the man-made product. It’s a naturally
occurring material but often it is combined with the muck that comes from oil production. There are some
places in the world that are exposed to extreme heat, at the bases of lakes, and where there are seams
of naturally occurring deposits. It’s an endlessly elastic and soft, malleable material and it has been studied
extensively as it’s both a liquid and a solid. It can be very rigid, like glass and it breaks easily, even
shattering, but when it’s heated, it becomes really fine and its viscosity is really interesting. I heard about
an interesting experiment called the Pitch Drop, conducted by research scientists in Queensland.1 Even
though it ‘sets,’ it’s never really rigid. In my work, I’m interested in learning and expressing the idea that,
while we might consume or use materials in particular ways and view them as ‘done’ or ‘set,’ actually
even concrete takes between 2-5 years to fully set. I’m interested in the human-centred, ‘me-centred’
expectations and rules that we place onto materials, but that aren’t inherent in the materials themselves.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
Mycelium is a material that I’ve just started working with and it’s definitely something that I will continue
working with in the future. I still have a lot to learn. I’ve been working with a mycologist, which has been
great, but I’ve learnt that there are certain conditions that make some things more successful than others.
For instance, having a sterile environment is important for growing mycelium and my studio is not very
sterile. To create the work I purchased mushroom spawn from an Australian mushroom grower and put
it through a substrate. Different substrates can be used for different mushrooms as they each require
different nutrients to grow. In this work I have used pine woodchips as a substrate by soaking them in
water that has lime in it, to raise the pH so that it becomes digestible for the mycelium. These substances
are then combined, ideally in a controlled, sterile environment. The plastic bags I have used are punctured
with hundreds of tiny holes, as it needs oxygen to survive and grow, but I have placed micro-pore tape
over them so that bacteria and other contaminants can’t get in, and sealed the bags. Essentially, the
mushroom colonises and consumes the entire cavity of space within.
1 https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
I’m not feeding the mycelium the nutrients it needs to actually grow mushrooms out of it, so I just take it
out of the plastic bags to dry. Once it’s dry, it’s completely dead and can be baked in an ordinary oven, at
about 200°. Nothing burns away, it just dries out the form. What was keeping the bacteria alive was
moisture, so once it’s dried it can’t grow anymore. Saying that, I have put “dead” ones into my compost
at home and mushrooms have grown, but they were already springing up before I started adding
mycelium so it’s hard to say where they’re coming from.
Mycelium is an amazing material that exists in soil all over the world. Current scientific research is
happening in regards to the co-existence of plants and animals with different mushroom species.
Mushrooms can spread underground, through mycelium, across hundreds of thousands of kilometres;
across countries and even potentially across continents. I was initially interested in mycelium because it’s
a very strong material. I’m interested in making sculptures that I can engage with physically; not merely
within my hand-hold, but with my body. So they go from being objects, to being forms.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
I also don’t want to create huge things that I then have to sell or gift, or I have the problem of what to do
with them once an exhibition is over. I want my practice to be sustainable so that I can continue to
produce work. I don’t want to drown in my own work. I also don’t want to be limited to only creating work
that people might want in their garden or home. Not to disparage that kind of work, I just don’t want it
to be at the forefront of my practice. The concepts I’m interested in aren’t necessarily aesthetically
rewarding for people who like more decorative work. So it’s important that the materials I use are strong
enough to work with on a large scale, but also are materials that can break down again. For instance
bitumen, even once it has been laid down and set, can be broken up and heated and re-used, unlike
concrete, which we put into landfill. Mycelium is becoming more popular building material, and people
have started to make bricks with it. Although it doesn’t look very strong visually, on a microscopic scale
it’s actually incredibly strong and even used to make multi-storey high-rise buildings. It obviously would
need to be rendered to protect it from breaking down.Hemp is another alternative building material, and the structure I’ve made from hemp has multiple
internal hollows that are formed in the making process. Hemp stems are like straw and when it’s cut and
submerged in water, it expands. If lime shale is added, it acts as a binding agent but unlike the mycelium,
which grows to the size and shape of the mould that it’s in, hemp has to be compacted to gain strength,
only becoming strong under pressure. So you can see in my work where it has been compacted against a
wall in my studio. The hemp and lime work is very brittle in some parts but where pressure has been
applied and it has been rendered it’s protected and very strong. If the render is removed, the material
can be broken down again and biodegrade. In terms of the cost of producing hemp, it’s seen as a much
more sustainable material than many other current options.
In Japan there are these amazing co-habitational mud brick houses that have daikon (radish) growing in
the walls. The root structure of the daikon, just like the mycelium, form a kind of reinforcement inside the
walls and then the vegetable comes out of the wall. So it forms a kind of symbiotic relationship in that it
helps provide structure to the wall and it feeds you as well.
The hemp form in the exhibition is like a cross-section, it has two distinct sides to it and I wanted both to
be clearly visible. But I wanted it to be something that has a kind of dynamic between its inside and
outside, rather than a front and a back. There’s the side that has been pushed against the wall, to compact
it, and this could be seen as if this is only one half of a form, or a cross-section.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
I love the limestone from the Heide site in that it’s so soft and brittle, but also so strong. I love that there
are marks on the bricks of Heide II from where branches have scratched across them, making visible the
interaction between the building and its environment. The limestone boulder that is in the work looks like
a boulder but has had a small number of interventions into its form. I’ve made incisions; filing and sanding
back to create small, intimate hand spaces. I would love to let visitors touch the limestone work, but it’s
difficult to say to viewers that they can touch one thing but not another, so we’ve kept the gallery ‘rule’
of not touching all of the works. No one has touched and broken more of my work than me!In this exhibition there are forms made from
bitumen, mycelium, Hempcrete, beeswax, and a
limestone boulder. One of the reasons I work
with a variety of materials, is because they all
force me to engage with and test various
sculptural and material principles, such as
density, viscosity, fragility, and porosity;
elemental properties. Rather than deciding on
all of these materials at the outset, working with
each material has generally led me to the next.
This process is really one driven by personal
interest and instinct. But, being aware of my
taste and my instinct, I’ve also looked for
interconnections between things that sit outside
of what is right in front of me. I started working
with mycelium because of a magazine my mum
gave me and I read about a man in the UK who
made lights out of mycelium. Contrast is also of
interest to me. There’s a contrast between the
bitumen and the mycelium, in that they offer a
way to counter ideas of natural vs unnatural;
organic vs manmade. It’s not about those
binaries. It’s about getting rid of those natural vs
unnatural distinctions. All of the materials are of
the same world as we are. All are natural and
unnatural. The contrasts exist aesthetically and
in the associations we make with those
materials.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
Another part of my practice is the act of reaching out, without necessarily knowing exactly what it is that
I need to learn, to people who don’t necessarily want to share their knowledge and trying to work out
how to make that exchange respectfully. Almost always I am reaching out to specialists who are male.
Not all of them, obviously, but many are male. I try to convey my interest and also gain trust and
encourage them to share their knowledge, not of their own practice but of the material, so that I can then
decide what I will do with it. The more technically proficient one becomes, the more affordable the
materials become. In the early stages of working with mycelium, when I didn’t fully understand the impact
of contaminants in an ideally sterile environment, I was spending considerably more on materials than
say a scientist would spend if working in a sterile lab. There are also many things that won’t be in the
show; works that I started, but that weren’t successful. To some degree, these are experiments that didn’t
successfully grow. But this is the work I’ve made. Not the work I wish I’d made. Not the work I want to
make one day. This is it. It’s about being informed by the nature of materials and the nature of
experimentation. It’s not about where you end up in a process of trial and error. It’s about the process
itself. I want the work to feel quite full, even uncomfortably too much. This work is very much growing
towards future work. It’s just one point; one world. It should be an encounter.
And then it’s over.In conversation with Brooke Babington - Curator
Isadora Vaughan has been exhibiting in solo and group shows since 2010. Gaia Not the Goddess represents
her first solo exhibition in an institutional setting, which follows one of the guiding principles of the Project
Gallery at Heide. The installation is also part of the Climarte Festival, which occurs biannually, and aims
to inform, engage and inspire action around the subject of climate change.
Vaughan creates large sculptural forms that reconsider the basic properties of materials. For this
exhibition, Vaughan has installed 38 large, bitumen panels so that they cover the entire gallery floor. They
are a luminous, pitch black; much darker than one sees on the roads, as they are very fresh. This acts as a
unifying visual element to tie everything together, which includes about ten sculptural forms in the space,
made from a variety of other materials.
Gaia not the Goddess, 2018, process image; bitumen, clay and crushed rock
Vaughan creates materials-focused artworks. When she chooses a material to work with, Vaughan
considers our understanding of it from a scientific point of view, the industrial processes related with its
use, as well as its poetic associations. For example, bitumen is made of residue from the petroleum
distillation process, and is most commonly used in road construction. It therefore evokes ideas of the
depletion of natural resources, particularly our renewable energy sources. From another perspective, if
we consider fossil fuel’s original source as organic material, which over time has been compressed into
natural deposits, we remember that even though we have turned it into petrol, it was once living
organisms. It’s also interesting to note that asphalt is 100% recyclable. In fact, it is the most recycled
material in the world.
So for Vaughan, any one material becomes quite a complex web of connotations that she signals through
her work. One material can provide a constellation of meanings and associations. Vaughan reconsiders
the properties of materials and their capacity to signal meaning beyond themselves. She thinks about how
they’re made, how they’re used, their history, and their potential for emotional association, political
association, and poetic association. She thinks about how she can experiment with them; how they can
be ‘un-made,’ or made in a different way.Some of the works Vaughan created for this exhibition are made from bio-composite materials associated
with sustainable development. Two are made from mycelium, which in simple terms is the root system
of mushrooms. It’s a really fast-growing material used for sustainable building. It is grown in a mould,
activated with lime and sawdust and it grows to fill the mould. It’s then fired at low temperatures in a kiln
and it becomes brick-hard. The other material she uses is a compound of hemp and lime, which is
marketed as Hempcrete. It’s a lighter, more flexible alternative to concrete. It is significant because it is
carbon negative, which means that across the whole life-cycle of the material, it draws carbon dioxide
from the environment.
Vaughan has also made use of materials sourced onsite at Heide, such as beeswax from Heide’s apiary
and a giant boulder of Mt Gambier limestone, which is quite spectacular in the gallery space. This is the
same material Heide II is constructed from. Vaughan’s assemblages could be considered as compounds,
or entanglements of some things that are living and organic, and some things that are synthetic, which
have been inflected by human interference. In this sense, they explore elements of the built and natural
environments at Heide. In the past, Vaughan has made quite a lot of site-specific work. Again, you can see
her re-imagining materials that are used commonly, in new ways.
What’s interesting about this exhibition at Heide is that viewers can follow threads of connections through
her works, such as the lime compounded with mycelium and the lime used with hemp, to the limestone
featured in Heide II, which she has used to create complex assemblages that reference the site and the
wider natural world. Her works can be seen as little eco-systems in themselves, which have been
influenced by human interaction. They link the natural and cultural histories of Heide with references
spanning beyond the site.
The works raise questions about how we live in our built environment and in our natural environment.
Hierarchical concepts of value in materials: is a material good or bad? Clean or unclean? The
Anthropocene is the current geological age; the period in which human activity has caused the greatest
impact on climate and the environment. Beyond this, recent feminist theorists and cultural
anthropologists talk about other ways we could discuss this current period of geological and social history
and Vaughan’s work references these ideas. An interesting idea is posited by theorist Donna Haraway,
author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. In this book, Haraway proposes the
term ‘chthulucene’,2 instead of Anthropocene. Regarding the environment, Haraway thinks that calling it
the Anthropocene is misleading, as it really doesn’t highlight the effect of capitalism itself as the root
cause of such great impact, rather than human activity per se.
Anthropocene - noun
The current geological age, viewed as the period during
which human activity has been the dominant influence on
climate and the environment.
Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene
began with the Industrial Revolution.
2 https://laboratoryplanet.org/en/manifeste-chthulucene-de-santa-cruz/Another theorist that Vaughan has researched closely is Anna Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End
of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. In this book, Tsing weaves a long metaphor about
how the mushroom could be considered as a model for how we might imagine sitting with the discomfort
of our current environmental plight. Tsing gives a detailed history of the mushroom; in particular a
mushroom that grows after logging has occurred. Some mushrooms create a fusion with the root systems
of the trees and mushrooms springs up. The metaphor she draws is essentially about the mushroom as a
survivor in times of precarity, as a model for how humans could work with the natural world, and with
organic species and inorganic materials and move forward. These are some of the ideas that Vaughan is
thinking about when she creates her complex assemblages of organic, inorganic, and human inflected
sculptures.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
The title of the exhibition, Gaia not the Goddess, refers to Gaia of Greek mythology, who is the
personification of the earth, like a Mother Earth goddess. Vaughan also refers to is the Gaia Hypothesis,
which is the scientific proposition that the earth is a complex and interconnected super-organism,
encompassing all living forms and non-living systems, which is quite a radical idea. This system self-
regulates to preserve the conditions for life to continue. There’s a podcast on Radio National that Vaughan
listens to. In fact, the title comes from that podcast.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sciencefriction/gaia/10017340
In referencing this theory, Vaughan is not suggesting that we should just leave the earth as it is, and it will
self-regulate to survive. In fact, she’s not claiming to have the answers. Rather, she uses the works in this
exhibition as a means to consider ways that we consume our environment and produce and reproduce
our environment. She encourages viewers to ask these questions, and offers the work as a way of sitting
with and thinking through some of these complex ideas.Questions for Brooke Babington - Curator
What challenges did you encounter during the install process?
The bitumen panels were pre-prepared to minimise work on site and needed to be laid (with plastic
underlay) and joined together. The smell of bitumen was strong while the panels were being laid, but
quickly dissipated as the material settled. The innate volatility of the bitumen meant that for some time
it was still slightly tacky underfoot. With one week to install, this presented a small challenge, but it
compacted with the foot traffic of lots of visitors and stabilised rapidly within the first week of the
exhibition.
Installing the limestone boulder also had its own particular challenges. The floor of the Project Gallery is
load-tested for 500kg per square metre, and the boulder weighs one tonne, which is twice the load tested
weight. So we placed a two metre long board under the boulder (and under the bitumen) to distribute
the weight. It also had to extend to the entrance of the gallery to the place the boulder is installed, in
order to support the weight of the machine used to install it.
How clear were Isadora’s and your ideas about where each element/form would be placed in the gallery
space before you began installing? If there was a detailed plan, how much did it change during the
install?
The elements were positioned onsite. First the boulder was placed - Isadora was clear ahead of time that
this element should have a sense of reaching out of the gallery space - and then each remaining element
was determined in relation to the last and the installation as a whole.
How did the materials themselves influence placement? What about scale?
Views through or across certain materials determined their placement, so that materials interact in the
visual field. The scale of the boulder and the hemp-lime compound needed to be negotiated as they are
of a similar size, colour and ‘heft’. There are elements on a much smaller scale - such as the mounds of
bitumen, intermittently around the gallery edges - that work to refocus the eye from large to small, bulk
to detail.
Questions for Students
1. In Vaughan’s exhibition title, she makes a point of saying that she is not referring to the goddess.
So there is a contradiction; a push-and-pull of ideas happening in the title. Why do you think
Vaughan chose this title for this exhibition?
2. What relationships can you see between the various components of the artwork? How does your
concept of the work differ when viewing it as one artwork as opposed to many? Consider your
physical relationship with the work as a viewer.
The Gaia Hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis, posited by scientist James Lovelock in the 1960s, positions the earth as a huge
ecosystem made up of living and non-living things, and rejects the view of Gaia as a singular goddess.
This is interesting in relation to Vaughan’s consideration of Gaia not the goddess
as being one artwork (rather than ten individual artworks).GLOSSARY Assemblage art that is made by assembling disparate elements, often including found objects and materials scavenged by the artist. Biodegradable substances or objects are capable of being decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms and thereby avoid pollution. Binaries, in this instance, are used by Vaughan uses to mean divisions into two groups or classes that are considered diametrically opposite (as opposed to viewing concepts as complex and intersectional). Contaminants are any polluting substances (e.g. dust, dirt, insects) that make something impure. Density is the degree of compactness of a substance. Distillation is the process of separating the components or substances from a liquid mixture by using selective boiling and condensation. Distillation may result in essentially complete separation, or it may be a partial separation that increases the concentration of selected components in the mixture. Ephemerality is the act of being ephemeral, or temporary, transitory, impermanent. Fragility is the degree to which an object or material is easily broken or damaged, which is often linked to its brittleness. Malleable is the pliable quality of a material that can be hammered or pressed into shape without breaking or cracking. Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a network of fine white filaments (hyphae). Organic describes any natural matter or compounds with a carbon base, as well as foods farmed without chemicals or pesticides. Standards vary worldwide, but organic farming features practices that cycle resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Porosity is the degree to which a rock or other material has minute interstices, penetrable by liquid or air. Rendered stone or brick has been covered and thereby sealed with a coat of plaster. Regressive stereotypes: To regress is to return to a former or less developed state. Vaughan uses the word regressive to indicate a return to what she sees as backwards stereotypes from the past, such as “traditional” gender roles. Super-organism most often describes a social unit of eusocial animals, where division of labour is highly specialised and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. Ants are the best-known example of such a superorganism. Symbiotic relationships are mutually beneficial relationships between two different organisms living in close physical association. Synthetic pertains to compounds formed through a chemical process by human agency, as opposed to those of natural origin. Temporality is the state of existing within or having some relationship with time. Treatise: a written work dealing formally and systematically with a subject. Viscosity is the state of being thick, sticky, and semi-fluid in consistency, due to internal friction and often impacted by temperature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015, p. 20.
2. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press,
Durham and London, 2016.
3. Rosi Braidotti and Timotheus Vermeulen, ‘Borrowed Energy: Timotheus Vermeulen talks to
philosopher Rosi Braidotti about the pitfalls of speculative realism’, Frieze: Contemporary Art and
Culture, 165, 2014, p. 132.
4. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Bio-power and Necro-politics’, Springerin, Hefte fur Gegenwartskunst, 13, no. 2, 2007,
pp. 21–23.
5. Thom van Dooren, ‘Temporal promiscuities in the Chthulucene: A reflection on Donna Haraway’s
Staying with the Trouble’, Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 8, no. 1, 2018, pp. 91–92.
6. Bruno Latour and Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Extending the Domain of Freedom, or Why Gaia Is So Hard to
Understand’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 3, 2019, p. 660.
Installation view, Isadora Vaughan: Gaia not the Goddess 2019
Photograph: Christian Capurro
QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS
1. How has Vaughan used visual language to communicate ideas and meaning in her work?
2. Select two Art Elements and two Art Principles and discuss how Vaughan has manipulated them
to create aesthetic qualities in her work.
3. How does Vaughan’s subject matter reflect the historical and cultural contexts in which the art
work was made?
4. Compare and contrast Vaughan’s work with fellow contemporary artist Gregory Euclide’s Real,
Natural and Unsustainable installation. How do his microcosmic worlds made from found objects
relate to Vaughan’s work in terms of materials and processes, as well as thematic concerns?
https://www.gregoryeuclide.com/gallery/
5. Compare and contrast Vaughan’s work with artist Robert Smithson’s sculptures and earthworks
of the 1960s and 70s. How are they similar and different with regard to their use of materials and
processes, and their conceptual interests? https://www.robertsmithson.com/
6. Vaughan lists artists who have influenced her practice as Walter de Maria, Phyllida Barlow, Cathy
Wilkes, the Mono Ha artists from Japan, Marisa Merz and Joseph Beuys, as well as Australian
artists Susan Jacobs, Bianca Hester, Nick Mangan and Katie West. Conduct research into these
artists to find influences in in Vaughan’s work through concepts, materials and/or processes.You can also read
