17 FEB – 4 MAY 2024

OPENING NIGHT: 6pm FRIDAY 16 FEB 2024.

Click here to download exhibition catalogue.

With performance: Symbiosis: Reverence + Protest (Sonic weaving and dance). With Sue Simpson (Sonic artist/multi-instrumentalist), Charlotte Haywood (interdisciplinary artist), & Peta Lumley (dancer).

MNEMONIC VEGETABLES helps us ‘remember’ our connection to the living plant world, Mother Earth and each other. Through recent residencies at The Lock-Up, Muloobina/Newcastle; Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre (JCU) Gimuy/Cairns; GoctaLab- Amazonas, Piruw/Perú; various locations in Mexico and the participation of invited guests; multi-layered stories of plant- knowledge, places, practices, materials, networks and collaborations are honoured through shared process, relationships and sometimes form.

MNEMONIC VEGETABLES combines botanical works, installation, multi-channel video, music, community workshops, performance, drinkables and exchanges. In response to the potent site of the Lock-Up and Muloobina/Newcastle as the world’s largest coal port and place of environmental activism, Haywood looks to co-venerate plant-human relationships through a symbiosis of protest and reverence.

The works look at multi-modal mnemonics-or-memory devices, through our relationships to story, mythologies, melodies, dance, landscapes, the plant ‘Queendom’, ecologies and ourselves. In this way, the artists create a shared space for remembrance and reverence of our connections to the plant world, the living planet and each other.

THANK YOU + ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Gerry Turpin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lauren Tynan, Tyson Yunkaporta, Aviva Reed, Wade Davis, Lynne Kelly.

They acknowledge that works and materials are exhibited and made on the Lands of the Awakabal and Worimi people of Muloobina/Newcastle; Widjabul Wya-bal, the greater Bundjalung Nation, Kunwinjku and Githabul peoples; the continuous Traditional Custodians maintaining Land, Culture and plant Knowledge; and that sovereignty was never ceded.  Materials have been sought to honour seeding + sustaining positive earth relationships. They have either been harvested and processed locally (Wilsons Creek, North Tumbulgum, Brunswick Heads, Lennox Head, Main Arm, Woodburn) or received through fair trade with responsible harvesting and processing from Gunbalanya community, Arnhem Land, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, APY Lands, Araliya Community Company, Sri Lanka, and Yucatán, Mexico.

About Charlotte Haywood

Charlotte Haywood lives on Bundjalung Country in Northern NSW. She is an experimental interdisciplinary artist working across the senses. She seeks cultural and linguistic nuances of the body and ecologies to decrypt and unfold multi-narratives; unearthing emergent narratives of coexistence.

She has cultivated a highly collaborative and process-driven practice that is dedicated to eco aesthetics and the nurturing of biodiversity. Cultivating places of vulnerability, care, reciprocity, regeneration, joy and participation; nurturing self-assembly.

Charlotte is a master weaver. She experimentally trades between the tactile and the digital, form and phenomena- working across textiles, sculpture, installation, public art, film, theatre, live art, music, food, linguistics, communities and ecologies.

Her performative practices and allegorical materials can vary from hybrid architectural forms to the ancient technology of tapestry weaving in a symbolic un-weaving and reweaving of interrogated histories and land management practices, cultural botany, ecological restoration, synaesthesia, gesture as language, edible data, community cookbooks, creative disaster recovery, sonic weaving, evolving multi-narrational video works, production and costume design.

Charlotte is committed to seeking new depths of site-specific response, creative collaboration and community engagements. She has worked on projects in remote and regional Australia, Vanuatu, Thailand, India, Peru, Mexico and Japan.

She is collected by the Museum of Applied Arts + Sciences, Sydney, the National Film + Sound Archive of Australia, Tamworth Regional Gallery and ARTBANK. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Northsite Contemporary Arts (2023), Outerspace (2023), Firstdraft (2023), Caloundra Regional Gallery (2022), National Still Life Prize (2021) Tweed Regional Gallery (2021), Caboolture Regional Gallery (2021), Lismore Regional Gallery (2020), Logan Art Gallery (2019), Wangaratta Regional Gallery (2019), Australian Design Centre (2017) Fishers Ghost Art Prize (2014), Incinerator Art for Social Change Award (2015) VIC, Sculpture by the Sea (2008, 2019) NSW, Ne Na’ Contemporary Art Space (2015) Thailand, Casa Lú (2020) Mexico City.

Learn more about Charlotte here.