Teresa Peters is an artist and filmmaker based in Tamaki Makaurau, currently working
in clay and ceramics, photography and moving image. She is interested in bodies, earth bodies, forming
and transforming. Chemical compounds and molten entities, in intimate
combustion. ‘Excavating’ primordial totems’, as we move on into the
sixth mass extinction. Ceramics is alchemy. Earth, water, air… fire...
RENDEZVOUS 2015 ‘excavates primordial totems’, as we move through the
Anthropocene, the epoch where human activity took dominant effect on the
environment. Navigating fetish and value in times of late capitalism
and environmental dystopia. These bodies of subverted totems, look to L
‘informe’s interest in destroying categories and knocking art off its
metaphorical pedestal. Interested in an esoteric, or Dada-esque poetry
of connection and touch, converses between forms that could have come
from a strange exotic, maybe pre-historic, jungle. Often sexualized,
sometimes seductive, these curious entities evoke an uncanny
juxtaposition between biomorphic, anthropomorphic or monstrous forms.
Tensions draw between logic and alternate measures. They employ the
scientific practice of fieldwork and archaeology, juxtaposed with an
exploration into the expanded field of sculpture and post – minimal
practices (eco- feminism, land art etc). Timothy Morton suggests a
re-evaluation of ecological thought, looking past the construct of
“nature” towards “Dark ecology”, somewhat like the abject of ecology,
its “irony, ugliness and horror.” Morton looks towards a perspective
that embraces diversity, magic and the abject, and is weary of human
refinement and ideals.
