Andrew Gorman-Murray, 2015

This collection of work delves into processes of housing, homemaking and dwelling that lie beyond human control. The centrepiece of Post-Human Dwelling is an eponymous multi-panel work that explores the spatial and architectural conditions that prevail when houses outlive their human usefulness. These are post-human dwelling places: where nature reclaims housing, where material traces of human activity also reveal the limits of human agency. In human terms, this is decay; in post-human terms, this is the vitality of matter and nature.

In this work, I express visual and material qualities of post-human dwelling through experimental processes of image degradation. Starting with high-resolution ‘ruin porn’, I translate the images into multiple, low-quality black-and-white copies in order to explore the unravelling fabric through the grain and blur of the degraded image. ‘Poor images’ are cut and folded into paper houses, shifting between 2D and 3D forms and exterior and interior perspectives. I divide, grid up and imbricate images to offer up different ways to speculate on post-human dwelling.

Interstitial Homemaking and Empire: Fabricating Housing Systems – develop complementary visual expressions and techniques that enable further exploration of the material and other-than-human practices and aesthetics of housing, homemaking and dwelling.