AMALGAM (2024)

Amalgam uses grafting as a method to explore themes of hybridity, entanglement, ecology and material culture. Encompassing a series of ceramic sculptures, casts of organs, branches, leaves, antlers, plastics, and human debris are merged with found rubbish, and natural materials such as whiskers and fleece. Various detritus of human presence transfuse into amalgamations of flora and fauna, creating slippages between what is biological and artificial, natural and synthetic. Exploring notions of the ‘cast off’ and excess, these hybrid fusions examine the complex entanglements between production and consumption in contemporary society, and the natural environment. Amalgam explores hybridity as a means of re-imagining what it means to be human and redefining how we interrelate with nature—how we perceive its boundaries, and understand its enmeshments with society.

(Words by Lauren Downton, 2024)

CATALOGUE TEXT

By Josephine Mead (2024)

Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.[1] – Rosi Braidotti

Amalgam by Lauren Downton considers what it means to be human—through ceramic and sculptural practice, through personal experience, and through the conditions that we collectively find ourselves in—socially, physically and psychologically. At this current juncture in time, we humans are de-centralised, multifarious and ever-becoming. Now more than ever the livelihood of the natural environments that surround us are contingent on our evolution, as we are on theirs. Downton’s practice celebrates this interconnectedness, echoing notions of material vibrancy that lead to ideas of posthuman connection, as considered by the likes of cultural theorists Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett.

Downton breaks down hierarchies of matter, assembling casts of found detritus—both natural, (leaves, branches and antlers) and manmade (such as discarded plastic) aside casts and forms that suggest human and animal bodies. Through combining these forms in her sculptural assemblages, she allows the various elements to be on equal playing fields. It is the dismantling of hierarchies between human matter, natural matter, and inorganic matter that makes Downton’s work, and the work of said cultural theorists, of interest and very ripe for possibilities of future world-making. In the words of Braidotti, “in the ontological gap thus opened, other species come galloping in.”[2] One is encouraged to consider what other species or other possibilities it is that Downton is creating space for.

Her practice echoes processes of grafting in horticultural contexts, where two specimens will be fused together to grow a new hybridized form. The liminal spaces that exist between life and death foreshadow the work. Possibilities for growth meet notions of dormancy, as non-living and discarded detritus is collected, and considering through the different stages of life-cycles that it has passed through. Forms that once held a function, then moved to disuse, are collected by Downton and cast to live anew. Through ceramic process and sculptural assemblage, a type of propagation or regeneration is enacted. Acts of grafting can be seen as a metaphor for processes of artmaking. Artists collect, assemble and distil—physically and conceptually. As Bennett suggests, “An actant is […] an “intervener,”[3] An operator is that which, by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.” Downton reminds us that all is connected, that we are in endless stages of becoming, and that we are never far from death and rebirth.

Working between life and death; object and ghost, matter and non-matter, Downton examines our states of permanency, transition and decay through human and non-human worlds. With a deep understanding of how matter “has a life outside of us,” this is work that calls for empathy towards all elements of our world.

[1] Rosi Braidotti, The posthuman. (Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013), 1.

[2] Rosi Braidotti, The posthuman. (Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013), 67.

[3] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 25-26.

Photography by James Field