Every other work I make is called Immaculate Conception
Immaculate Conception (2025)
RMIT Graduate Exhibition. Sand, ice, bronze, steel, copper, acrylic. Dimensions variable
Water holds immense power and kinetic potential. It’s use value is obvious. Immaculate Conception, however, supposes an analogy between water and exchange value – the abstract, relational value which serves as the central axis for the economic organisation of our society. Neither water nor value have an inherent form; their forms are determined by relationship. The installation materialises the fluid metaphors used to describe capital: flow, trickle-down, liquidity, flood, pool, and freeze-simulating the changing forms of appearance of value within the cycle of capitalist accumulation. This formal fluidity allows the source of value–the labour of workers–to be obscured. It is as though value simply appeared, as if by immaculate conception.
“Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal,
taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping;
the quickened and the deadened, whirling on’
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
Immaculate Conception (2025)
Artist Book exploring parallels between religious mythology and commodity fetishism.
Immaculate Conception (2023)
Acrylic sheet, computer monitor, red dune sand, single channel video 1:51.
A diorama of an open cut mine made from red dune sand, made from Aboriginal land, whose sump reveals a kidney bean of a screen. Though divorced from its attendant frame, the ubiquitous screen is cast into the spotlight, a story in its own right, rather than it’s usual role as the transmitting mechanism for the story. The video montage is book ended by stills; the first of an open cut mine, the last frame a classic windows desktop photo of a rolling hill bright green set against a blue sky with white clouds, eerily idyllic. The fast edits in between show us how this actual, specific landscape is turned into this general landscape, propagated via default desktop settings across the world: through a byzantine production process of mining and refining raw minerals, designing and manufacturing components from them, assembling them together into devices, all joined by network of supply chains. Revealing the infrastructure – literal, technological and social – that is usually hidden.