Independent Researcher

Artist

Thesis Title: fieldwork/fieldwalking: art, sauntering and science in the walkingcountry

About

Perdita Phillips is a contemporary artist who integrates her interests in environmental thought and the science of ecology into installations, digital works, photographs, walking and sound art. She has written an encyclopaedia about termites, worked with bowerbirds and walked around in circles in Basel, Weil am Rhein and Huningue.

In 2010 her practice based PhD thesis fieldwork/fieldwalking was selected as the top three abstracts in Leonardo Abstracts Service Database and her essay, The case of the lengthening legs: cane toads in northern Australia, was published in J. Bull (Ed.), Animal Movements • Moving Animals: essays on direction, velocity and agency in humanimal encounters in 2011.

She organised, convened and curated Unruly ecologies: biodiversity and art symposium for SymbioticA and currently she is working on a spatial sound art walking project (The Sixth Shore) using high-end GPS technology.

Phillips has curated a number of exhibitions and is founder and co-editor at Lethologica Press. In 2012 she curated (as Lethologica Press) Art/Text/Clearinghouse Project + Western Australian Photographic Book Survey at the Perth Centre for Photography.

Current questions in her practice include how to express the 'mesh' of ecosystems (borrowing from Timothy Morton), how to bring together the urgency of biodiversity loss with the unruliness of ecosystems, and in what way can the seduction of materiality be integrated into new media works?

Phillips welcomes collaboration across the arts and sciences. She envisages exploring the potential subject matter of fire in tropical savanna ecosystems, collaborating on text/art projects and creating a visual cartobiography of rocks in book form.

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