Mary Rosengren

     
Mary Rosengren
La Trobe University, Australia
m.rosengren@ltu.edu.au
www.re-imagingnature.com


Biography

Mary Rosengren’s practice reflects her on going interest in the relationship between the experience of nature and its visualization in art and science. Her research of vegetation in extreme environments has taken her from saltbush of Lake Mungo, NSW to sites in the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland and the Antarctic Peninsular. Mary exhibited and worked with artist networks in Scotland for 15 years and is currently based in Australia. In 2011 she received an Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) Synapse6 Residency to research CSIRO Biological Collections and was CSIRO Discovery’s 2012 Artist in Residence. In addition to exhibiting in the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia, Mary lectures in visual art at La Trobe.

Illustrated Talk

Yonder: research journeys in art and science
“A new visual culture redefines both what it is to see, and what there is to see.” Bruno Latour 1986. The background to this presentation is the project Re-Imaging Nature that draws together the experiences and observations of artists and scientists in installations of sound and image projections, archival print and artists books. It includes Fruitingbodies, Groundcover 2000, The Real Thing 2003, Digitalis 2006 and the installations Hidden Visions, Ground Truth 2008 and Vera Narrent 2011-12. This illustrated talk considers the scope of analogue and digital image/ media processes and spaces used in my art practice since 2000. I examine the idea of coherence and comprehending (the) yonder view of nature and technology. My works re-contextualize historical and contemporary material and reflects on the issues of recombining technological processes, visualisations and the challenges of the interdisciplinary environment. This is an in-between space of observation and experience, where the increasingly accessible imaging technologies and visualisations have radically different spatial and spectral characteristics. My on-going research Re-imaging Nature considers the processes, experiences and observations of ecologists, and the veracity, mutability, value and purpose of images and visualisations that underpin the respective responses to natural phenomena and extreme environments. My research is the contexts, sites, scientific processes and interactions of ecologists, biological scientists and evolutionary biologists who monitor natural phenomena in extreme and remote sites in Australia, Antarctica and Scotland. I will show you visual and audio material from field trips, laboratory experiments and collections. My work raises issues about the relationship between images and our experiences of nature through optical and print technologies. While the science research raises fundamental issues pertaining to the ecology, my research is about the implications of visualising technologies and the way images contribute to our comprehension of the yonder view.