Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / FEBRUARY 2020
Christian Bishop
Australia
www.christianbishop.art
About
I am a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Naarm,
Melbourne, Australia. I work broadly across many mediums
including sculpture, photography, printmaking video
and sound. My art practice materialises as immersive
installations, interventions and site activations exploring
feeling and place, landscape and human connection. I am
passionate about being immersed in the landscape, whether
that be rural or urban. My practice involves attuning to
energy present in these places – to me the landscape is
about something deeper than just a visual cue. I am also
facinated by boundaries and this translates from spaces
around me into culture, subcultures and socially isolated
peoples and their blurring of boundaries though creative
outputs. For many years I ran experimental arts and music
collectives and explored rave culture as a form of cultural
and social resistance, performing under the name Xian. I am
half of artist duo EXOGAMY.
Melancology
Arteles provided a unique opportunity to step back from the
commitments of daily life to explore themes of collaboration,
place and community. I drifted between working on solo
projects to collaborating with Ana Tiquia as Exogamy.
The Nordic winter landscape provided a sharp contrast to the
Australian summer of bushfires and floods. Even on opposite
sides of the globe it is evident the world is experiencing
unprecedented environmental changes from human impact.
This extreme global weather provided a backdrop to explore
notions of place and ecology with underlying themes of
landscape as collaborator.
The initial process was fluid and began by reading, thinking
and discussing ideas around how one would collaborate
directly with the landscape itself. The local landscape was
explored daily, by walking, looking, listening and feeling.
These explorations led to contact recordings of ice melting
and cracking, the sonic properties of trees and their root
systems, the creation of feedback loops between objects
and a mobile sound source. There were also the embossing
and printing of birch trees with natural inks, weavings of
reeds and branches, video recordings of strobing night
footage, and the collecting and assembling of branches as
rudimentary structures.
All these explorations culminated as impromptu
performances; the ritual planting and raising of three
flags (birch, lichen and sapling) as a reclamation to stolen
landscapes, a site specific birch and water intervention in
a sauna space and a performance playing back a recorded
storm resembling a blackened noisy dirge.
All in all what was set out to be achieved was far beyond
expectation and has provided new and exciting material and
ideas for many future projects.