Aluminium, thermal foil, anchor cables, tubing, string, steel, PVC, adhesive tapes, wire, PLA FDM 3D prints
4000 (l) x 4000 (w) x 4700 (h)
Alicia Frankovich’s multidisciplinary practice explores the potential for new modes of imagining both human and non-human forms and behaviours. Micro and macro worlds converge and morph within her work, which has examined subjects ranging from probiotics, viruses, and strands of DNA, through to planetary systems. Frankovich pushes the limits of these phenomena, speculating on new possibilities and relations between what might normally be seen as disparate lives and worlds. Her new work is part of a longer-term project of constructing images of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, that foreground humanity’s entanglement with the more-than-human world.
Feather starshade 2024 builds on Frankovich’s response to diverting from The Blue Marble, the 1972 photograph of the Earth taken by NASA astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in recent works such as Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies or AQI2020. For the artist, the photo represents, ‘a way of thinking of Earth or nature as separate to humans, as over ‘there.’ Her expanded, artistic engagement in departing from this image and the movement it represents, seeks to ‘unpack a separatist, binary separation in thinking which has been devastating for lands, peoples and the myriad of non-human species, which also queer nature through indeterminacy and becoming.’
Feather starshade is a new sculptural installation in which Frankovich intersects references to advanced astronautical technology with organic life. In this work, a model of a NASA starshade is grafted with exploratory sculptural FDM 3D prints (which also read as drawings) starting from an underwater invertebrate known as a Crinoid or feather star, an ancient marine creature whose rhythmic movement through the ocean resembles a kinetic unfurling of plumage. The starshade is an apparatus designed to help view yet unseen exoplanets and stars. It shades light to enable these planetary environments to appear.
Feather starshade propels us from the depths of the ocean through to the outer limits of the known universe, linking some of the oldest life forms on earth with futuristic explorations of the galaxy and reminding us of the wonder, depths and great mysteries of the cosmos we inhabit. Frankovich’s speculative convergence of the technological apparatus with organic life expands possibilities for being and knowing, while critiquing the separatist logic that underpins ‘Big Tech’ plans of colonising other planets as a means to escape the wreckage of earth wrought by climate change.
