Project 13
ARMOUR FOR FLOWERS - Katy B Plummer
Curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen.
January 4th – January 24th 2020, Tangent Projects gallery.
ARMOUR FOR FLOWERS is a project about accidental mystical encounters, and how it might be possible to understand and integrate direct spiritual experiences while existing in a stubbornly secular world.
“I’ve been thinking about non-physical realities and what happens when we engage with them, either by deliberately seeking them out or by accidentally tangling with them, and how we can structure and contain and integrate these experiences, even if we haven’t been given many – or even any – useful cultural containers for them.
In starting to talk about WHY I might not have any “useful containers for Spiritual Experiences”, I want to first acknowledge those with colonised or enslaved heritage, and the ruptures their spiritual traditions have endured at the hands of my ancestors. Those of us with settler-colonial ancestral heritage are in an ethically precarious position, even in relation to non-physical realities and experiences. This material isn’t exempt. It isn’t neutral and separate from the world. The rupture between me and this material didn’t come from nowhere, it rubs right up against the horrors of history. It (along with everything else it also especially) embodies and contains the tense politics of whiteness and non-whiteness.
White settler-colonial Christianity and white supremacy have a long and tangled history, and European Christianity’s complicity in the horrors of patriarchy and imperialism have rendered it worse than meaningless, to me, and to many other people of settler-colonial descent. But our own folk traditions, our own ancestral, pre-Christian pathways into relationships with concepts such as “The Divine” and “The Spirit World” have been largely decimated and buried. There are crumbs remaining, and some valiant attempts at reconstruction, but even these reconstructions seem often tainted with this same toxic cocktail of patriarchy and capitalist white supremacy: either hierarchically problematic and reactive, and/or entirely fluffy and emptied of spiritual nutrition, and/or else thoughtlessly and devastatingly dismissive and consumptive of the colonised and marginalised people of the world. And even when they’re not, we are – I am – suspicious of them, out of habit.
So, in essence, this project is furthering and making explicit my attempts to “unsettle” and rebuild my settler-colonist’s relationship with the unseen world. It’s about the process by which I’m beginning to structure, contain, buffer and integrate this aspect of my existence.”
ARMOUR FOR FLOWERS by Katy B Plummer is a continuation of the exhibition project Prototypes for a Feminist Future, a group exhibition curated by Tsering Frykman-Glen for Tangent Projects in 2019. The exhibition sought to stimulate a dialogue regarding the potential of non-gendered structures and to explore how to create an equitable microstructure, this would go on to develop the ideological foundation for the Tangent Projects space.
Katy B Plummer
Katy B Plummer has a video, performance and installation practice. She uses the grand sweep of west-, euro- and male-centric history as a kind of raw narrative material, pulling it apart and sorting its threads, repurposing cultural forms, posing her own sweaty existential questions. She is interested in personal revolution, violence and witchcraft as legitimate political strategies. She uses domestic textiles and the aesthetics of high-school theatre as energetic containers for volatile ideological material and unstable emotional assemblages. She lives and works on land owned by the Guringai and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
Katy B Plummer has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has shown in many solo and group exhibitions including in Galerie Pompom, AIRspace Projects (Sydney), Incinerator Art Space (Willoughby), Borderline Art Space (Iasi), PS122 (New York) and Bien Cuadrado (Barcelona) and had video work at Play at Fair. (the alternative non-commercial women artists art fair, during Miami Art Week 2017) among others. In 2019, Katy was a NSW Visual Arts Fellowship finalist and in early 2020 she will be part of a curated exhibition - The Centre - at Mona Foma festival (Launceston, Tasmania).
This is the 5th time Katy has collaborated with Tangent Projects, but the first solo presentation of her work.