EARTHED

The origins of time and of counting in turn seem to lie somewhere between the cycles of the earth and the moon (with the human body as medium) and the lines of a journey, a life toward change. ~ Lucy Lippard, Overlay

EARTHED (to connect an energy system into the ground) - stems from the earthing of pure electricity in Maree Horner’s seminal work Chair 1973. EARTHED draws together the works of mother and daughter - 1970s Post Object forerunner Maree Horner and Teresa Peters - award winning contemporary clay/ceramics artist and filmmaker, in a dynamic exhibition that crosses time and territories.

Rupture as the mother of change and regeneration, EARTHED pivots around the 2022 filmic re-visitation of art action, Tideline, 1971. Re-inacted by Maree Horner at the original location 50 years into the future, and archived as film by Teresa Peters.

In the 1970s the expanded field of sculpture headed out into the landscape. In 2023 it traverses a much more porous relationship with the environment. Subterranean, corporal, non-human and virtual realities are included in extensions of space and time. Both artists’ contemporary practices hold uncanny parallels, juxtaposing embodiment with the geomorphic, evoking the erotic, touch meeting trace, debasing the monument while navigating porous boundaries, systems and structures, pivoting between action and the archive.

Both artists call Taranaki home. Prehistoric mollusk fossils called Ammonites are sometimes discovered along Taranaki’s coast. They map 201 million years since the Jurassic and then Cretaceous period. Transforming, breaking down over millennia into fossilised crystals and gasses—triggering volcanic activity. The last eruption of the stratovolcano occurred around 1854, it has erupted 160 times in the last 36,000 years

Geologic Ruminations is a new series by Maree Horner. She currently works in graphic body scale multimedia works that are monolithic testaments to the female – an innovative fusion of mono-printing and graphic painting. Stemming from Familiar Monuments, 1996 originally shown at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery and this February 2023, in Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm at Artspace Aotearoa. The archaeology of the ideas can be traced back to her 1970’s sculptural work and drawings.

Recently celebrated as raw clay ‘artefacts’ in the first photograph to win the Portage Ceramic awards and nomadic project DISASTROUSFORMS.COM. Teresa Peters fuses contemporary clay/ceramics, photography, digital platforms and public space to explore touch, haptics and the crystalline geomorphic forces of quartz (50% earth’s surface) - an activator in ceramics alchemy, volcanic eruptions, digital touch screens and the human third eye/cells via piezoelectricity and sound. She navigates the archive exploring disaster and rupture as the mother of revolution. From corals and fossils to volcanoes to the quartz in your mobile phone - breaking new ground.

GROUND ZERO is the second in a series of collaborations or pairings between the two. In 2021 they filmed the Taranaki lahars for MOLLUSK REFERENCE, as part of MOLTENENTITIES.COM: Notes on moving mountains, in From things flow, at RM Gallery. “Filming the dusky transition into night over the undulating forms... On the surface we stand in the moment… lava and liquid earth flow through our minds… space becomes timeless out there on the ruptured mountain edge, somewhere between the mollusks - the mountain - the cosmos…’ I’m happy to swap a world of wholes and parts and distances for intimacy... I’m happy for a time of zero landscape.’