A series of photographs from the artist's explorations of Lake Weyba during a provocation focusing on ‘The Feminine Landscape’.  These provocations were carried out as part of the collaboratory project A Topography for Reflection in the Floating Land Festival 2021.

What does memory look like?  How does my body in the landscape reactivate those memories, particularly as a feminine presence in the landscape, both literally and metaphorically.


Land Response 3

Together Apexing and Oasis render dualistic realities of 2020 – the cataclysmic unfolding of alarming events and the temporary euphoria of an unexpected hiatus from the daily grind.  A surreal ambiguity has overcome the human race as virtual and tangible realities overlap.  As we watch the destabilisation of our everyday reality on our screens, real events take on an air of fiction, a fiction that causes a cognitive collision as we step out of our doors into the smoke, the masks, the silence.  Through enforced isolation and liberated from our time we retreated to our interior world, into our homes, into ourselves and into cyberspace.

The first chapter of this diptych APEXING, is a construction of news media, sourced through a process of searching the daily headlines from 1st Jan 2020 through to the end of March. An evocative image and a word were selected as signifiers of events that defined each day, particularly as a marker within major sagas of the time. Revealed through this process was the language and imagery that infiltrated our collective identity through the universal drama that was 2020. As the video bombards its audience with pictures and words of trauma, it makes for a challenging watch, even within its fleeting one-minute timespan.

The second chapter of this diptych OASIS, is a montage of images from Instagram posts sourced through searches like #covidreflections. Selected for their optimistic air they capture the short-lived phenomena of mass self-realisation brought on by a sudden profusion of free time in early Covid-19 lockdowns. Their depiction of playful freedom makes for a stark contrast to APEXING. As APEXING depicts the unfolding dilemmas of 2020, OASIS depicts the escapism that only the internet could offer during self-isolation and the grim reality of global events. 

By Bianca Tainsh. Music by Eco Futurism Corporation. Created with the support of Boxcopy, Brisbane.


APEXING & OASIS

As an endeavour to circumvent the paradigms of contemporary human existence, artist Bianca Tainsh traverses the shores of Lake Weyba to observe and coalesce with the natural world, creating interpretive documents of her experiences along the way. 

The title of this work comes from an essay by Astrida Neimanis - Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, a key text for the artist’s current explorations.

Following a universal epoch of digital burnout and sensorial deprivation, Archive of Meaning & Matter encapsulates an exquisite exploration of the material and visceral, resurrecting moments of primordial connection to natural elements. As the artist transcends into the landscape, she ultimately embraces the experience as both an organic and techno being.


Archive of Meaning & Matter

As an endeavour to circumvent the paradigms of contemporary human existence, artist Bianca Tainsh traverses the shores of Lake Weyba to observe and coalesce with the natural world, creating interpretive documents of her experiences along the way. 

The title of this work comes from an essay by Donna Haraway - The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others, a key text for the artist’s current explorations.

The Semiotic Space called Earth is an archive of the artist’s ventures to transcend into the landscape, and transition from anthropocentric conditioning to become ‘a cohesive, natural being’. Her experience is explorative and liberating, as she is captivated by both the material and metaphysical elements encountered in a contentious landscape.


The Semiotic Space called Earth

Winner of the New Media category in the 2021 Queensland Regional Art Awards.

With a practice grounded in social change, open-disciplinary artist Bianca Tainsh generates spaces for reflection on social dilemma, with suggestive cues to self-evolve.  Her work To the Citizens of Paradise was conceptualised as a response to the exodus of urban inhabitants to idyllic rural locations, in the wake of COVID-19. As towns swell, commercial development is accelerated.  And this multidimensional work is an entreaty to these new neighbours to embrace a perspective of locality – biosphere and village culture - over notions of convenient consumerism.  

As this particular example (the Civic Centre expansion on the Sunshine Coast) exhibits, inserting mass consumerism into paradise ultimately erases its qualities and reconfigures them into a homogenised ideal of the ‘best life’.  A QR code actions the viewers’ phone to a video that makes this temporal transformation palpable.  At the same time, Paradise can be perceived as the natural world, in which case the work implicates us all as ‘citizens’.

The video component to this work is designed to be viewed on a mobile phone. View the video at https://www.biancatainsh.com/cp


To the Citizens of Paradise

As my home, Lake Weyba has been integral to my deep reverence for nature. The Tangible Landscape of Memory was created during an exploration into memory imbued within the Weyba landscape. With both natural and human phenomena unfolding around me, I was acutely aware of the emergence of new memories, and of my influence on the memoryscape. My feminine presence and artistic attention took real and imagined form, as I responded to Weyba and her many elements. A resonance was generated between our watery bodies. I transformed Weyba and she transformed me.

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Bianca Tainsh