"Metabolic Scales" 2022-25

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Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, and Scott Mitchell)
Artist collective formed 2003: Terri Bird (she/her) lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria; Bianca Hester (she/her) lives and works in Dharawal and Gadigal Country/ Wollongong and Sydney, New South Wales; and Scott Mitchell (he/him) lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria.
"Metabolic Scales" 2022–25
banded Iron, LED sign, moving image, sound, mild steel
Courtesy of the artists.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Metabolic Scales explores metabolism and extinction (life and death) in relation to the unbounded consumption of resources. Based on research and fieldwork in the Pilbara, Western Australia on the lands of Nyamal and Kariyarra custodians, this new commission explores biological, geological, and social entanglements.
The work follows multiple material flows from the earliest forms of microbial life to the extraction of iron ore, and the circulation of this mineral in the global market. The physical movements of iron ore are captured through video footage and live vessel tracking data: from its mining in the Hamersley Range to its export as one of Australia’s most significant mineral resources, traded across global shipping routes, and transformed into industrial steel for nation building and consumption. The capital circulation of iron ore’s value in the global financial markets is indexed through live data on an LED screen.
Mined from banded iron formations, iron ore owes its geological origins to a biological one—cyanobacteria—a microorganism pivotal in the origins of life. Credited with the initial production of oxygen, cyanobacteria are regarded as the most successful organism on Earth. They developed a metabolism that obtains energy through photosynthesis, passing it onto other life forms such as plants and animals. Today, cyanobacteria are found as symbionts with other interdependent life, such as fungi, lichen, and corals, as well as in the human body.
This transformation of Earth’s atmosphere is registered in marine bacterial fossils known as stromatolites, which can be found in the Pilbara. A milled steel reproduction of a stromatolite is included in this installation. Formed by communities of cyanobacteria, stromatolites are known as ‘living fossils’, created through the interaction of biological and geological processes, blurring the boundaries between life and non-life.
Over millions of years, stromatolites transformed the Earth’s atmosphere in what is known as the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’, which led to the first major extinctions and the formation of banded iron. By referencing past climate crises, Open Spatial Workshop offers ways of considering our rapidly collapsing future in relation to Earth’s deep material histories.