Absurd Ecologies
PhD Presentation
Deakin Waterfront
Project Space Gallery (Space A & B)
November, 2025
Deakin Waterfront
Project Space Gallery (Space A & B)
November, 2025
My practice-led research (PhD) investigates how contemporary art methods can reveal new social and aesthetic understandings of our connections with water ecologies. The project integrates performance, multi-channel video, sound, mutlimedia sculpture and speculative writing to explore emotional and conceptual responses to environmental collapse.
Central to my PhD is the development of the concept speculative fatigue, a term coined through my research to describe the emotional and cognitive exhaustion of anticipating ecological decline while remaining critically and affectively engaged.
Grounded in eco-feminist and posthuman theory (Haraway, Braidotti, Alaimo), the research positions water as an active agent within relational, affective, and ecological systems. The initial methodology evolved from community-based oral histories operating within the Victorian Murray Floodplain Restoration Project (VMFRP) to an embodied, site-responsive performance practice.
As a result of the VMFRP’s evolution, a speculative persona, the Sole Surviving Human, emerged and expanded to enacte absurdist fieldwork at global water sites across five continents (Oceania, Europe, North America, Asia, and the Arctic region), performing grief, humour, and endurance as forms of ecological inquiry.
This final exhibition, Absurd Ecologies, was presented at the Deakin Waterfront Project Space Gallery in Geelong, situated directly opposite Corio Bay on Wadawurrung Country. The gallery’s expansive windows frame the working port and tidal bay beyond, allowing the water to become an active component of the installation.
Within this setting, the exhibition transformed the gallery into two distinct environments, Space A and Space B, each exploring a different sensory and conceptual register of the research. Space A operated as a field laboratory of measurement: stacked light boxes, readymade flood markers, and a tetrapod inflatable sculpture foreground the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of environmental observation. Space B functioned as an immersive sound and multichannel projection environment, layering hydroacoustic recordings and video documentation of site performances to evoke an embodied encounter with speculative fatigue, the emotional and cognitive exhaustion of anticipating ecological collapse.
Together, these interconnected environments transformed the gallery into a vessel for reflection, vulnerability, and absurd survival in the Anthropocene. By activating both interior and exterior dialogues, between light and sound, observation and immersion, the exhibition embodies the thesis’ proposition that contemporary art can render ecological crisis into an embodied, affective, and relational encounter with place and precarity.
Central to my PhD is the development of the concept speculative fatigue, a term coined through my research to describe the emotional and cognitive exhaustion of anticipating ecological decline while remaining critically and affectively engaged.
Grounded in eco-feminist and posthuman theory (Haraway, Braidotti, Alaimo), the research positions water as an active agent within relational, affective, and ecological systems. The initial methodology evolved from community-based oral histories operating within the Victorian Murray Floodplain Restoration Project (VMFRP) to an embodied, site-responsive performance practice.
As a result of the VMFRP’s evolution, a speculative persona, the Sole Surviving Human, emerged and expanded to enacte absurdist fieldwork at global water sites across five continents (Oceania, Europe, North America, Asia, and the Arctic region), performing grief, humour, and endurance as forms of ecological inquiry.
This final exhibition, Absurd Ecologies, was presented at the Deakin Waterfront Project Space Gallery in Geelong, situated directly opposite Corio Bay on Wadawurrung Country. The gallery’s expansive windows frame the working port and tidal bay beyond, allowing the water to become an active component of the installation.
Within this setting, the exhibition transformed the gallery into two distinct environments, Space A and Space B, each exploring a different sensory and conceptual register of the research. Space A operated as a field laboratory of measurement: stacked light boxes, readymade flood markers, and a tetrapod inflatable sculpture foreground the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of environmental observation. Space B functioned as an immersive sound and multichannel projection environment, layering hydroacoustic recordings and video documentation of site performances to evoke an embodied encounter with speculative fatigue, the emotional and cognitive exhaustion of anticipating ecological collapse.
Together, these interconnected environments transformed the gallery into a vessel for reflection, vulnerability, and absurd survival in the Anthropocene. By activating both interior and exterior dialogues, between light and sound, observation and immersion, the exhibition embodies the thesis’ proposition that contemporary art can render ecological crisis into an embodied, affective, and relational encounter with place and precarity.