Perdita Phillips

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Perdita Phillips is a contemporary artist who integrates her interests in environmental thought and the science of ecology into installations, digital works, photographs, walking and sound art. She has pondered pollen, written an encyclopaedia about termites, worked with bowerbirds, made a mountain and tumbled down storm drains. She is currently Activating Regional Collections Artist Residency at the Museum of the Goldfields with Art on the Move and Art Gallery of Western Australia Regional Exhibition Touring Boost funding.

Recent writings include Follow the water chapter in C. Bates & K. Moles Living with water: everyday encounters and liquid connections ((2023, Manchester University Press), Lithic Love for The Architectural Review (2022, https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/lithic-love), Seeping, maintaining, flooding and repairing: how to act in a both/and world (2022, Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology), fossil III for the Lost Rocks project (2019, A Published Event, Hobart) and Postcards from the Underground: Walkshopping as Relationing Otherwise. Journal of Public Pedagogies. 4, 127-13 (Neimanis, & Phillips).

Phillips has curated a number of exhibitions and is founder and co-editor at Lethologica Press. She curated the online exhibition Tectonics: bringing together artistic practices united by lithic thinking beyond human scales as part of Ngā tohu o te huarere: Conversations beyond human scales conference (2021). In 2022 she coedited Vol 8 of Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology (Particular Planetary Aesthetics) and was editor of CSPA Quarterly journal issue 36 Both/And featuring 19 artists from Australia and around the world.

She was part of We Must Get Together Some Time, a collective slow art project with 10 other Australian artists, the underfoot collaboration and will be exhibiting in the Indian Ocean Craft triennial with the Melange group in 2024.

In 2010 she organised, convened and curated Unruly ecologies: biodiversity and art symposium for SymbioticA and her practice based PhD thesis fieldwork/fieldwalking (2007) was selected as the top three abstracts in Leonardo Abstracts Service Database.

Current questions in her practice include how extractivism, geoasethetics and lithic love might interact (part of the both/and conundrum), how to bring together the urgency of biodiversity loss with the unruliness of ecosystems, and in what way can the seduction of materiality be integrated into new media works?

Phillips welcomes all sorts of collaboration across the arts and sciences. She envisages exploring the potential subject matter of lo-fi animations, fire in tropical savanna ecosystems, collaborating on text/art projects and creating a visual cartobiography of rocks in book form.

(and yes, she has wide interests)
Address: PO Box 747
Fremantle WA 6959
AUSTRALIA

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35 Papers
12 Books
13 Solo exhibitions and projects
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Papers by Perdita Phillips

Perdita Phillips ✿ Structural grotto

Garland, 2024

A short commentary on the making of the 'structural grotto (exchange)' installation made for the ... more A short commentary on the making of the 'structural grotto (exchange)' installation made for the Melange exhibition by the underfoot group.

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Follow the water

Living with water: everyday encounters and liquid connections, 2023

This chapter considers place-based artistic investigations of the urban drainage of the regional ... more This chapter considers place-based artistic investigations of the urban drainage of the regional city of Albany/Kinjarling in Western Australia. It presents a range of paired black and white photographs that capture some of the contradictions encountered in a long-term investigation of the geo-bio-socio-cultural network of water that begins with rain falling and moving along drains, through living places, to the Southern Ocean. The Follow the water project was conceived around the concept of porous repair as a way to maintain a contingent – yet effective – position as a human in a more-than-human world

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Particular Planetary Aesthetics: Introduction

Swamphen: a journal of cultural ecology, 2022

Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its... more Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns.

In this guest editorial note, we write in the wake of the ravages of climate crisis fires in Australia, as well as the borderless COVID-19 pandemic. We flesh out the project in its beginnings above, and introduce eleven papers and three visual portfolios of art research in practice that respond to our provocations before and after the Auckland conference. Collectively these scholarly and aesthetic works consider, trace, and respond to affective encounters of the particular and the planetary in the capricious spaces of the Anthropocene-in-the-making.

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Seeping, maintaining, flooding and repairing: how to act in a both/and world

Swamphen: a journal of cultural ecology, 2022

This paper outlines the experiences of a short artist in residency called Follow the water at the... more This paper outlines the experiences of a short artist in residency called Follow the water at the Vancouver Arts Centre in Albany, Western Australia that began in November-December 2018. Investigating the local network of urban and peri-urban drainage, the project was an attempt to reframe drains from what they are normally seen as—of a way of transferring ‘problems’ to elsewhere—into a space of reparative engagement. Intimate, makeshift walks were taken with drain allies along road culverts and agricultural drains and through snaky, polluted and weedy country. Walks were recorded with cyanotypes and a further cyanotype workshop was conducted with the public on the subject of local watercourses. Whilst being attentive to the local stories of water, settler history and regeneration, the project nevertheless attempted to problematise the current quasi-legal and commonplace notions which see the flow of water leaving a property downstream (and downslope) as being ‘not my problem’. In a small way, this art project works through the “impurity of caring” (that acts of caring contain the wish that it were not so (Shotwell), at the same time that they are entangled) with a tactical move that I have termed “porous repair.” It therefore provides a short example of the complications of thinking through water stories using artistic means.

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Lithic love: listen to the rocks

The Architectural Review, 2022

A short text on rock love and the intertwining of personal and bodily histories and extractivist ... more A short text on rock love and the intertwining of personal and bodily histories and extractivist economies: we are all bound up in catastrophe and repair. Lithic indifference can cut both ways -- but love can also take many forms.

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Postcards from the Underground: Walkshopping as Relationing Otherwise

Journal of Public Pedagogies, 2019

This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where par- t... more This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where par- ticipants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenome- non—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attune- ment to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a com- ing together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, the authors turn to Lauren Berlant’s recent writing on the commons. They suggest that their walkshop was what Berlant would call ‘training’ in living with the awkward and complicit relations of being in common.

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inConversation

inConversation was a collaborative exhibition amongst creative higher degree by research candidat... more inConversation was a collaborative exhibition amongst creative higher degree by research candidates (from the School of Communications and Arts and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), local, national and international arts practitioners and researchers from different art forms and discipline backgrounds. The exhibition invited conversations between artists and researcher collaborators working together to produce a broad range of creative works, culminating in an exhibition titled inConversation, staged at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space in October 2014. The context for the inConversation exhibition aimed to inform and expand on current debates about the challenges and benefits of inter- and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the arts. While collaboration within discrete artistic disciplines has been quite common, it is now becoming increasingly important for artists to look beyond their silos and invite interactions with researchers in other discipli...

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Thirteen Figurings: Reflections on Termites, From Below

This image essay is a creative reflection back upon _The Encyclopaedia Isoptera: An encyclopaedia... more This image essay is a creative reflection back upon _The Encyclopaedia Isoptera: An encyclopaedia of the arts, sciences, literature and general information about termites_, which was mostly written by the artist between 1997 and 1998, and forward to what termite art might undo today. Without access to living termites and, predating multispecies ethnographies, the _Encyclopaedia Isoptera _was an investigation into the limits of knowledge around termites. Looking back, it can be seen that certain strategies in the Encyclopaedia, such as looking at superseded or alternative knowledge, was a way of interrogating the boundaries of the sensible/insensible, and parallels more recent explorations of entangled boundaries between humans and others. Looking forward, I propose that response to, and responsibility for, unloved others can occur via respect for difference and indifference to form what Neimanis refers to as _strange kinships_ (Neimanis 117). Entangling ourselves with the alternative (destructive, cryptic, potentially immortal, coprophagous) acts of termites can open up environmental art to different emotional registers and facilitate critical hope. ‘Living with’ termites may go some way to addressing the tendency towards adopting apocalyptic thinking in environmental art and the ‘environmental procrastination’ currently seen in climate change debates.

Termites, social insects, superorganism, archive, environmental art, art and science, insensible, strange kinship, groundswell, indifference, environmental procrastination

Animal Studies Journal, 5(1), 23-47.

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Night for Day: Anticipating Environmental Futures Through Contemporary Art

Presented in the form of an image essay, the mixed media installation Night for Day (The Owl of B... more Presented in the form of an image essay, the mixed media installation Night for Day (The Owl of Bunbury spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk) (2015) is described and briefly contextualized in relation to more-than-human worlds, local histories and stories, sea level change, and other Anthropogenic trajectories. To create the artwork, the artist explored historical and predicted flooding events in the regional town of Bunbury, Western Australia. She combined, transformed, reconstituted, and rearranged data and material things in a process of investigating how futures might be imagined and anticipated. Representations of southern boobook owls (Ninox novaeseelandiae) made from rainfall maps fly across the installation. Water from Leschenault Inlet (part of Derbal Elaap) was brought into the gallery space. The overall poetics and affective register of material elements of the installation are enhanced by being presented as full spread images.

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First and last port of call

Catalogue essay produced for Portals: past, present, future 14 November to 13 December, Western A... more Catalogue essay produced for Portals: past, present, future 14 November to 13 December, Western Australian Maritime Museum Victoria Quay Fremantle. The exhibition featured 23 emerging and established artists with work based around the port of Fremantle:

Patricia Tarrant, Shiva Amir-Ansari, Nic Compton, Simon Gilby, Denise V Brown, Sally Stoneman, Lorraine Spencer Pichette, Angelo Caranna, Beverley Iles, David Small, Vanessa Wallace, Eva Fernández, Tracey Hart, Denise Pepper, Criss Sullivan, Dianne Souphandavong, Anna DeLaney, Andrew Nicholls, Richard Foulds, Karin Wallace, Robyn Pickering, Stuart Elliott, Perdita Phillips

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Postcards from the Underground

Journal of Public Pedagogies

This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where partic... more This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenomenon—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attunement to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a coming together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, t...

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Geology, art and imagination: creative propositions for visual representation and cultural narratives

by Suzette Worden and Perdita Phillips

SPECTRA: images and data in art/science. Proceedings from the symposium SPECTRA 2012, Mar 2014

"Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information ab... more "Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. The results of this engagement are being shown not only through the way artists and designers are developing innovative visual representations but also through the way images are combined with other media or through artists challenging the status of the visual through prioritising other media, such as sound.
The ways in which artists have worked with geological data is also a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures. Many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. Instead of accepting, or even creating, binary oppositions this paper will examine how virtual and material spaces are not oppositional but connected and communicated through creative practice for the earth sciences.
This presentation will provide a short overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, highlighting historically significant examples. It will include a discussion of themes being explored in the work of interdisciplinary artist, Perdita Phillips whose project, The Sixth Shore is exploring the geological formations and the natural environment at Lake Clifton, in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia. Phillips works with spatial sound, presenting immersive sound environments in galleries and in situ (using GPS technology). How connections are made back to the material world and the consequences of meshing the visual and the sonic will be analysed and discussed."

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Artistic Practices and Ecoaesthetics in Post-sustainable Worlds

An introduction to sustainability and aesthetics: The arts and design for the environment, 2015

The concept of sustainability, its discourse and societal application has been subject to pointed... more The concept of sustainability, its discourse and societal application has been subject to pointed critique, including claims that the term has become an empty rhetorical vessel, is liable to greenwashing or that critical reflection is required on the political and philosophical underpinnings of sustainability and sustainable development (Holden 2010; Phillips 2007). Part of the critical framing around an aesthetics of sustainability has already been explored by artists and thinkers such as Maja and Reuben Fowkes (2012) and Sacha Kagan (2011). Sustainability’s broad nature mirrors the complexity of environmentalism and allows for many different aesthetic approaches. It asks of us to decrease our consumption and also to take a transdisciplinary perspective (Kagan, 2010). However a significant trend in twenty-first century relations with the natural world has been a ‘darkening’ in the tone of debate and mobilisation of apocalyptic metaphors. Climate denial by some in society is mirrored by an underlying zeitgeist of despair and guilt in areas of the environmental movement (Anderson, 2010). I have argued elsewhere that this has left us open to ‘zombie environmentalism’ (Phillips, 2012b). Is it possible to stir from this apparent stalemate to a state of flourishing, by moving on from disaster? Morton (2012) argues for a re-examination of sadness and Soper (2008) reconfigures austerity into alternative hedonism. TJ Demos (2013) discusses the significance of a political ecology to artists working towards new formulations of eco-aesthetics. A key strategy for arts practice is to relinquish “the privileged position of its autonomous and exceptionalist positioning” at the same time as maintaining a ‘countervisuality’, or ability to see things and see them differently (Mizroeff, 2013). In my own work I see eco-aesthetics as a broad set of tendencies that will take us into new futures. Elsewhere I have outlined eight sensibilities in artworks that are more adaptive at dealing with uncertainty and imperfection, risk and opportunity (Phillips, 2012a). Working through Lauren Berlant’s ideas of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) as a way of escaping this sense of environmental procrastination, I’ve been considering how an artwork can both embody and encourage resilience in an unruly world, something that is still positive at the same time as it ‘stays with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2013). In a recent project about Little Penguins in Sydney I’ve been grappling with applying some sense of anticipatory readiness or “a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces” (Bennett, 2010, p. xiv). Through this practice-based example, this paper invites an aesthetics of action in the face of the inevitable uncertainties inherent in an ecological worldview.

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Networks and collaborations: Kynan Tan

Artsource Newsletter, Aug 2014

Short review of Kynan Tan's work

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Beautiful Vermin (Review). Gallery Central, Perth 8 - 29 March 2014

Artlink, Jun 2014

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Geology, art and imagination: creative propositions for visual representation and cultural narratives

by Perdita Phillips and Suzette Worden

SPECTRA: images and data in art/science. Proceedings from the symposium SPECTRA 2012, Mar 2014

Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information abo... more Artists who engage with the earth sciences have been able to explore all kinds of information about the natural environment, including information about the atmosphere, extremes of physical formations across immense dimensions of time and space, and increasingly ‘invisible’ realms of materials at the nanoscale. The results of this engagement are being shown not only through the way artists and designers are developing innovative visual representations but also through the way images are combined with other media or through artists challenging the status of the visual through prioritising other media, such as sound.
The ways in which artists have worked with geological data is also a rich area for identifying the relationship between digital and material cultures. Many artists working with this subject are crossing boundaries and testing out the liminal spaces between the virtual and the real. Instead of accepting, or even creating, binary oppositions this paper will examine how virtual and material spaces are not oppositional but connected and communicated through creative practice for the earth sciences.
This presentation will provide a short overview of theoretical links between visualisation and geology, mineralogy and crystallography, highlighting historically significant examples. It will include a discussion of themes being explored in the work of interdisciplinary artist, Perdita Phillips whose project, The Sixth Shore is exploring the geological formations and the natural environment at Lake Clifton, in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia. Phillips works with spatial sound, presenting immersive sound environments in galleries and in situ (using GPS technology). How connections are made back to the material world and the consequences of meshing the visual and the sonic will be analysed and discussed.

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Perdita Phillips – Sounding and thinking like an ecosystem

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Dec 2013

Perdita Phillips is a Western Australian artist working across the media of walking, sound, insta... more Perdita Phillips is a Western Australian artist working across the media of walking, sound, installation, photography and digital media. Through her multi-disciplinary multi-media art practice she explores the mutual relationships between people and the nonhuman world. Over the past ten years she has worked on art projects drawn from, and co-produced with, termites, minerals, bowerbirds, rabbits, cane toads, salmon gum trees and thrombolites, amongst others. With a background in environmental science Phillips’ work is often complementary to, though not constrained by, scientific understanding. Indeed her work often focuses on matter(s) that exceed scientific understanding or which might not be considered logically sensible in order to recover a sense of astonishment or wonder often stripped from scientific interpretation.

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Observing across scales: Broome Bird Observatory as a site of multiple exchanges

Animal Studies Journal, 2013

Roebuck Bay’s waters and shoreline fringes in the Kimberley of Western Australia are host to nonh... more Roebuck Bay’s waters and shoreline fringes in the Kimberley of Western Australia are host to nonhuman worlds of waders and bowerbirds. The Broome Bird Observatory (BBO) is the site of scientific investigations by professional ornithologists and amateur birdwatchers. Focussing on bird banding and the bowers of the Great Bowerbird, the author undertook fieldwork to investigate the nature of these points of exchange between nonhumans, scientists and artists. The imagery presented contrasts the dramatic colour and compositional elements of the environment with the more awkward and intimate details of human-animal encounters. Waders have worlds that span the globe, whereas male bowerbirds focus considerable attention on their bowers and the objects that they collect for them. Both bird banding and working with bowerbirds created sites of dialogue that mingled objective (scientific) and emotionally motivated processes in what Whitney calls ‘emotional ecologies’. For both waders and bowerbirds the surrounding environment was a significant ecological participant that fleshed out and enriched the field of investigation. In the art and science project Green, Grey or Dull Silver small green objects were offered as part of a ‘conversation’ at bowers. With bowerbirds, the individuality of birds played an important role in creating more reciprocal and dynamic engagements. A mixture of interaction and inter-patience (Candea) was required to both ‘speak’ and listen to the conversation of others. This image essay, therefore, endeavours to convey the richness of the affective landscape of emotional and material exchange at BBO.

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Fieldwork with bowerbirds

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture , 2012

An image essay about interacting with bowerbirds. Submitted version available at http://www.perdi... more An image essay about interacting with bowerbirds. Submitted version available at http://www.perditaphillips.com/portfolio/fieldwork-with-bowerbirds-as-submitted/

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Walk ‘til you run out of water

Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2012

This image essay brings together notions of dehydration and lostness in outback walking (based on... more This image essay brings together notions of dehydration and lostness in outback walking (based on personal experience) with its ecological counterpoint of the rapid change occurring in our world today. Analogical comparisons are drawn between the point where walking loses its rhythm (because of exhaustion) with ecosystems that, too, appear to have lost their way. Questioning whether it is only through rhythmic walking that positive states can occur, it is proposed that walking out-of-step leads to contrapuntal adjustments that can reinvigorate creative practice, utilising the same ‘adjustment to failure’ strategies critical to the experimental nature of contemporary art practice. The continual fine-tuning required for traversing rough ground also reflects the dynamic nature of ecosystems, which are permanently adjusting to change. Recent ecological theory’s focus on complex adaptive systems -- and resilience rather than stability -- means that our responses to ecosystems and the pressures we are placing upon them, must be dynamic, responsive and contingent. Does the sharpness of being without water focus us on the shifting socio-ecological conditions ahead? Walking and bodily sensitisation to place opens us up to different spatial and temporal scales. In making linkages with disability philosophy and research into community inaction in the face of climate change, it is argued that the inflection or break-in-step of a resilient style of walking can also be employed for creative socio-ecological change.

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