Christian Bishop (b 1973) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Bishop’s work explores identity and landscape as a relationship in continual flux and upheaval. He creates immersive installations, gallery interventions and site activations in the landscape through a practice which encompasses printmaking, sculpture and sound.

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Totemism and Exogamy explores the future of ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene. In a geological epoch marked by the impact of human activity on our planet, what does the future of animal, vegetable and mineral look like when all increasingly share elements of the human? From micro plastics in our oceans, to carbon found in the strata of our rock, to the mutation of antibiotic-resistant viral strains, human activity can be traced in all lifeforms on our planet. Inversely, how will these new understandings of the nonhuman affect our understanding of human-ness? What will evolve to survive the Anthropocene? To paraphrase Donna Haraway, how might humans and other species evolve ways to ‘stay with the trouble’ our time presents, and find ways to ‘live and die together’ on a damaged planet?

 

Bishops’ sculptural forms subvert notions of the natural and the human-made. Wood, metal and resin coalesce, creating forms both defensive, yet vulnerable - evoking both sacred and profane forms. These tentative forms are speculative gestures - the materialisation of futures not yet here, but whose presence looms ghostly on the horizon.

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Exogamy is marrying outside of one’s clan; a cross pollination, collaboration with, and the creation of ‘kin’ beyond biological family. Totemism is a system of belief where humans are said to have a mystical relationship between a spirit, sometimes an animal or plant. Totemism and Exogamy asks after the possibilities of both - how might humans and other species collaborate with each other in new types of worlding, in creation of new assemblages, new correspondences, new collaborations and to find new ways to survive or thrive in a time of rapid acceleration?

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