Isadora VaughanGaia not the Goddess

In realising her large-scale sculptural forms, Isadora Vaughan reconsiders the basic properties of materials and their capacity to suggest meaning beyond themselves—poetic, political, organic or otherwise.

For this installation, Vaughan has worked with bio-composite materials that have lately been gaining traction in debates around sustainable development: fungal mycelium and a compound of hemp and lime variously marketed as Hempcrete or Hemplime, along with materials local to Heide: the Mt Gambier limestone of McGlashan and Everist’s iconic Heide II, and beeswax from Heide’s colonies.

Vaughan’s assemblages are entanglements of (once) living organisms, and inorganic and synthetic matter inflected by human interference. Following metaphorical and material connections through these assemblages, patterns freely emerge which link the cultural and natural histories embedded in the Heide site with broader ‘edgework’ in feminist theory and cultural anthropology.