Urgent is the Rhythm is the first exhibition of work from The Metabolic Museum project. Presented as part of the 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, it brings climate and materials science together by charting the shifting states of sailcloth and seaweed. The project imagines the art gallery as a metabolising body which enables synthetic and organic material entanglements to occur, and as a contested site where the politics of conservation and collection are teased out, speculating on the museum as a collector of carbon and as a future site for carbon storage.
The work materialises C02 by giving it a physical presence as heavy, weighted blocks of carbon, transforming over a tonne of algae biomass and oyster shell waste collected from aquaculture industries in NSW and QLD into a novel biomaterial with potential for architectural application and use in building and construction. The installation includes loaned algae specimens from the State Herbarium of South Australia who have supported the research of algae unique to Southern Australian coastlines and who are a crucial resource in conservation biology and the environmental management initiatives underway across the region.
The project was developed in collaboration with the C3 Institute (Climate Change Cluster) in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology Sydney, Pacific Bio Australia, and Appellation Oysters. The exhibition catalogue with essays by Sebastian Goldspink, Curator 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, and Patrice Sharkey, Artistic Director at ACE Open accompanies the work.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The project has been supported by the Climate Change Cluster (C3), Faculty of Science, UTS; The State Herbarium of South Australia; Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; Appellation Oysters and Pacific Bio Australia.
