CURIOUS ENTANGLEMENTS

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Article (Exec Summary) written by Caitlin MacDonald

Writer & Editor (Art Formes),

Researcher (Centre for Curating the Archive UCT),

Masters Student (MPhil Environmental Humanities)

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Working against the logic of purity, Eugene Hön's Curious Entanglements are decompositions: morphing memory, subverting and stuttering forms, and staying with the trouble.

The vessels do not arrive in the world fully formed, unblemished. They are of the earth, marked by the shrapnel of their miraculous birth. Their bodies are crusted with debris of the clay womb, like comets spat out of the earth's core. These are vessels for the end of the world, made in gestures of repair, survival, and interspecies collaboration.

Hön's approach is multimodal. Intricate drawings of mycelium in ballpoint pen are digitally augmented with the assistance of graphic designer Dominic Hobbs, fudging, repeating, and contaminating fractal iterations which are then printed onto vessels which are themselves distortions of the ceramic, caked with dried fragments of discarded slip cast bodies. In cyborg-like collaborations, using computer-aided design and 3D technology, the artist generates innumerable phantom memories from these entangled two- and three-dimensional structures, transfers bleed into the textures of the crinkled shards or the smooth whiteness of exposed bone china. Octopus tentacles and fern fractals unfurl, mushroom clouds balloon, molten lava oozes, and sea slug softness laps up against scorched earth and grazing tar. Everything congeals to form compost, fragile rhizomatto iterations beyond simile.

Drawing on the multispecies ethnography of anthropologist Anna Tsing and the fungal studies of biologist Merlin Sheldrake, Hön's work forms delicate assemblages that mimic the relationships that are threatened and created in epoch of climate catastrophe. Fungal worlds emerge in the artist's work as a radical form of survival through collaboration and contamination. The fungal instinct for assemblage is at the heart of its resilience - fungus thrives in disturbed forests and in the violent microcosmos; it feeds on radioactive graphite at Chernobyl. The objects that populate Curious Entanglements remain unclosed, language-less, as muddled and muddied as our world, modelling in miniature the endlessly complex weave of vulnerable relationships through which we endure.

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