A psychedelic take on a Sugimoto seascape

Sammy Hawker is an ACT-based visual artist whose practice investigates sites of the Anthropocene. Through facilitating interaction with more-than-human entities, her work aims to draw attention to and make visible hidden temporal realities and cross-species entanglements of the many worlds in which she encounters. On a recent trip to Byron Bay, she pointed her camera at the ocean and invited it to participate in its portraiture. 

Words by:
Sammy Hawker

It was at the end of last summer I took a roll of 35mm film from the Easternmost point of Australia. It was mid-morning and the light was bright with a line of musing clouds forming half-heartedly on the horizon. The next week I processed this film using a jar of Byron Bay ocean water which travelled via courier on an inland migratory journey from the Northern Rivers to my red-brick apartment in Canberra’s inner-north. 

When processing film with ocean water the corrosive properties of the salt break open the permanency of the photograph. The ocean water lifts the silver emulsion and the representational image is rendered vague. An essence of the site is introduced to the frame as fractals form and salt crystals appear around the disappearing edges. To me it feels the image becomes alive; the ocean water an example of vibrant matter which paints its way onto the negative. 

A psychedelic take on a Sugimoto seascape. 

A glittering, mysterious, collaborative self-portrait. 

Acts of co-creation are never predictable and the resulting images can be unsettling. They challenge concepts of memory and preservation while awakening a yearning to capture some type of deeper feeling that proves both slippery and indefinable. Haunting the borders of certain moments but existing at the liminal edge of a vanishing image – always just beyond grasp. It is, as Bill Henson put, “the same thing which draws you in, is the thing that slips away.”

Through facilitating acts of co-creation in my practice I am interested in decentering my position as the artist while recognising and celebrating the agency of the more-than human. The concept of the ‘more-than human’ does not only refer to other living beings but extends to include all forms of matter. As Jane Bennett considers in her book Vibrant Matter, what are the political implications of recognising matter that exists outside of us – oceans, mountains, forests, storms and even methane-producing rubbish tips – as not passive or inert but rather as “forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own?” 

This position is what writer Charles Eisenstein would describe as a ‘deep radicalism’ where we are encouraged as humans to not see ourselves as separate of the other but rather embracing, as philosopher Michel Serres envisions, a new ecology based on a postcolonial equality between the human and more-than human. While many First Nations cultures understand this perspective, the infrastructure of modern Western societies validates domination and control over the natural world, rewarding the conceit of the individual and systems of mono-cultures. However, the fantasy of individual autonomy is thinly veiling the fact that even the human body belongs to an entangled world of symbioses where cross-species confluences are a near requirement for life. As Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt ask in their text Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, “How can we repurpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of ‘Progress’ to make visible the other worlds it has ignored and damaged? Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the worlds around us.” Accepting, celebrating and collaborating with the other cultivates empathy and is a responsible way of moving forward in an age of environmental crisis. 

This shift in world-view invites an awareness of how we hold ourselves in space. It welcomes a more intuitive stance – one that asks us to slow our frequency, breath more deeply and observe that which exists quietly in the shadows. In her essay Experiencing the Intangible, trans-disciplinary artist Maja Kuzmanovic describes her grounding process when preparing to work within a new site. 

“I meditate on extending the membrane of my subtle body beyond the physical one. With every in breath, I visualise my ‘self’ shrinking, and my skin becoming a reflective surface. With every out breath, I ‘unfold’ my membrane to include the people around me, the room, the village, even so far as the Laurisilva [laurel forest]. By the end of it, I feel thin and translucent, shimmering like a beech forest in the early spring.” The recognition of one’s energy field, otherwise known as the ‘subtle body’, as extending beyond the visible confines of one’s skin is a moment of tangible recognition of the effect of our every action. It also places us in a more receptive position to recognise other energy fields and cross-species entanglements that are in constant motion around us. 

Biologist Andreas Weber’s concept of ‘erotic ecology’ puts forward the notion that every ecology centers on the principle of attraction with love being an impulse to establish connections and intermingle with the other. As he states, “experiences of reciprocity allow us to feel both our own life and that of the world in a new, delightfully intense way.” I have personally experienced this in my recent practice, moments of almost unbridled joy at the results of co-creation with unpredictable elements. It is sitting with the discomfort of the unknown, surrendering to the unresolved mystery of the ocean and the dark energy that interrogates and transforms the photograph. It is the feeling of quiet curiosity in recognising the other as a vibrant force, full of agency and in that choosing love over fear. As ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose writes in Shimmer: When all You Love is Being Trashed, humans have the capacity for both violence and care and in this time of mass-extinction. We are going to be “asked again and again to take a stand for life, and this means taking a stand for faith in life’s meaningfulness.” Choosing love is to embody empathy both for ourselves and others. It requires us to forgo the Western notion of the autonomous individual, separate from other, and to instead embrace our place within the messy vibrant entanglements that exist both within and around us. As Weber writes, “… only by relearning to understand our existence as a practice of love will we grasp anew the overwhelming ecological and human dilemmas that we face … and find the means to deal with them differently than we have thus far.” 

Sammy’s solo show ‘Act of Co-Creations’ will be exhibiting at the Mixing Room Gallery in the ACT until 2 July. 

The artist would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land this body of work was created, the Arakwal Bumberlin people of the Bundjalung Nation. She pays her respect to Elders past, present and emerging.