Perdita Phillips

Perdita Phillips from Australia focuses on environmental issues and works with aspects such as sound and video in her installations.
From: Walyalup/Fremantle, Australia.
Shows: Cyanotypes.

[Show slideshow]

Dr Perdita Phillips is an artist living on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja focusing on environmental issues and social change since 1991. Often conceptually driven, she has an expansive practice working in installation, environmental projects, walking, sound, video, sculpture and publishing. She has been making cyanotypes and anthotypes and investigating other ways of having an ecologically sustainable art practice. Her work is marked by a continuing interest in the relationships between humans and nonhuman others (rocks, plants, animals, ecosystem processes). Phillips’ commitment to ‘ecosystemic thinking’ has led her to work with material and conceptual networks as diverse as drains, minerals, termites and bowerbirds at the intersection of the human and non-human worlds. After years of wrestling with the ideas of beauty and wildness, she decided that things are not simple: they are complex and contested and worth fighting for. This is what she calls the both/and condition: how to live in an impure and compromised world.

Perdita Phillips has exhibited in solo/group shows in Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Portugal and Ireland and undertaken artist residencies in Switzerland/Germany, Finland, Canada, UK and throughout Australia. Current projects revolve around geological time, extractivism and contemporary colonial unforgetting. She has been experimenting with soil treatments applied to paper—combined with inkjet prints and cyanotypes—as well as cyanotype animations (see https://vimeo.com/868214621).