Louisa Ferguson - Re:source Re:main Re:claim

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Louisa Ferguson, "Saving Grace," 2020

video, cattails, cattail leaves, pex, intravenous drips, 1250 sq. ft. Image courtesy of the artist.

Louisa Ferguson  MFA exhibition

Re:source Re:main Re:claim

Re:source Re:main Re:claim is an experiential installation that encapsulates my artistic entanglement with ideas of materiality, intra-action and agency. It is the outcome of the absorption, filtration and accumulation of the last two years spent exploring art, social issues, ecology, and the uncanniness of being. My explorations strive to narrate stories where humans are part of the entangled natural world. I posit that the artistic endeavour, by describing, dissecting, and understanding “things” causes these things, including us, to dissolve.

As an artist, I have always felt that the intra-action between what I consider myself and the material/object/entity I collaborate with shapes the articulation of my fingertips as I make, as it in turn is shaped by my fingers. I explore what can occur when we permit ourselves to consider artmaking as a tool that is finely tuned to attend to both the human and more-than-human/material entities at play, and I listen for the implications that arise when as an artist I listen to both nonhuman and human agencies.

The works in this show are gestures that emerge and take shape from intimate acts of witnessing where the agency of the more than-human-world connects with my own, and where the ambiguity of truth, causality, and purpose is allowed to breathe.

My work centers around the examination of what is ecological, how agency presents itself and to whom, and the perspective of art as collaboration with the more-than-human world. I posit that the creation of art, from process, to exhibition, to absorption happens between the artist, the object, and the viewer. I am concerned with exploring ideas of entanglement, intra-action, and most importantly how art is vital to our understanding of our relationship to the more-than-human world. Questions dedicated to understanding the implications that arise when artists listen to both nonhuman and human agencies, how objected-oriented ontology expands notions of material/materiality, and how these expanded notions impact artmaking and artistic practice are important focuses. Explorations of artistic practice which is not automatically articulated with the assumption that as the artist, I am the primary active agent is pivotal.