14 February 2015– 7th March 2015

Exhibition Launch:   6pm Friday 13th February, 2015

FOYER   SAMANTHA DENNIS (TAS) : THE GARMENT AS AN ECOSYSTEM: INSIGHTS TO BROOCH BIOLOGY 

Samantha Dennis, Specimen 1, The Garment as Ecosystem: Insights to Brooch Biology, 2014.

The premise of my studio practice is to occupy innovative and sculptural approaches to the making and wearing of jewellery. In this project I explored the garment as an ecosystem (and now the gallery in the garments absence) in which I could suspend a community of manufactured organisms in the mode of brooches. These brooches are intended to both exhibit aesthetic attributes from living organisms and translate conceptual constructs or relationships found within nature into practical devices for adornment. My practice is fuelled by the curiosities found in the natural world and a fascination with the processes of living organisms. Biological frameworks such as symbiosis, parasitism, habitat and the colony became the focus of this enquiries and questioning the parameters and dynamics of these relationships allowed for wider scope in my output. An appropriation of pseudo-scientific processes led the investigation to develop under an independent domain; an imaginary, constructed system of relationships. The investigation considered how the brooch might operate within its ecological constraints and what form the device might evolve into in response to environmental circumstance; whether it functions as a topographical device which exaggerates and extrudes the fabric in ways that might describe landscapes and habitats or as living organisms that might mingle on the garment surface, absorbing nutrients or forming communities.