Mineral Garden
with Andrew Rewald
2020

The 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN is the first collaboration for Randy Lee Cutler and Andrew Rewald. Working with the temporal and spatial displacements between Canada and Australia, their shared interests in the natural world and ecological crisis inform a speculative engagement with lifeforms and hybrid systems. Drawing on plants and minerals as material and metaphor, Mineral Garden offers alchemical propositions for a more sustainable world.

A collaboration at the National Art School (March-April) and Carriageworks (July-September), Sydney, Australia Mineral Garden is a speculative portal that takes the viewer through an alternative spacetime of hyper terrestriality. Glints and facets of these realms are revealed through the entanglement of collages, posters, mineral specimens and archival objects. A reading area supports the project with significant books that have inspired the collaboration. Mineral Garden hybridizes botanical organisms in the soil and the geological forms beneath our feet to cultivate narratives pasts, alternative presents and possible futures. The installation speculates on the secret life of plants and minerals revealing their potential for emergent worlds and lifeforms.

Mineral Garden can be viewed as a nonlinear series of hybrid stories based on seemingly disparate but interrelated formal and informal knowledge practices, to cultivate alternative narratives on botanical organisms in the soil and the geological forms beneath our feet. The installation weaves between three rooms of differing atmosphere to speculate on the secret life of plants and minerals and what might exist in-between. The work presents the potential for emergent worlds and lifeforms that further reveal our interconnectedness with the universal elements vital for all life. All this highlights relationship that are manifest in the ecologies we unearth, create or destroy, but are inextricably part of.

Due to COVID 19, the exhibition at the National Art School was cancelled. In July it was remounted in a new configuration at Carriageworks.