Jess Sutherland ‘Twin Field I’
Jess Sutherland ‘Untitled VIII’
Jess-Sutherland ‘Twin Field V’
‘WILD MIND’
by Jess Sutherland
Mezzanine Gallery - 09.03.23 - 20.04.23
“I am struck by a pervasive illusion of separateness; the distinct sensation of mental edges - cerebral borders - that cleanly and firmly define the limits of our humanness, removing us from the vast relational network of which everything else is apart. This is a wound. So old and so complete, that we cant see it anymore for it defines the very nature of what we assume ourselves to be; something else. Something other-than-wild. As such, I have a vested interest in a different mode of seeing. One that recognises the inter and intra aspects of our existence here - weaving us back into an earthly cosmology. Indifference to the natural world renders the wildly diverse and connected as a siloed sameness. Insistence on reiterating borders leaves humans as mono-crop, instead of holobiont. In this act of not seeing, we forget what we are.
Thinking of animacy, and the prisms of language and grammar through which we weave subject/object orthodoxies into the bedrock of our cultures, I left language in the wake. Instead, sounding into existence a diffractive, non dominant seeing; collected earth pulling across the surface of the page, drawing out a feel of and for the world. Inadvertently rewilding the noisy, static quiet of consciousness. Falling into fields, weaves of reality. Finding a twin. Asking how might you live in what you know to be kin.
"Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse." (Barad, Agential Realism, 2007, p. 185)
Jess Sutherland ‘Untitled III’
Jess Sutherland ‘Transmission’