PROCESSING PLANT
2021-22
ARTIST: Anna Dunnill
DIRECTION & VIDEOGRAPHY: Jess Cockerill
ESSAY: Sarita Gálvez
‘Strings of Sustenance: Feeling/sensing/spinning weeds on Wurundjeri Land’
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Humans have been making string and thread for over 35,000 years. Intimately connected to the body, the process of twining together plant or animal fibres forms the basis of jewellery, bags, vessels and clothing.
In Processing Plant, the laborious trajectory from plant to cloth is front and centre. To produce thread, artist Anna Dunnill turns to an unusual hyperlocal source of fibre: an invasive plant called Araujia sericifera, or moth vine, that grows freely in alleyways and along train lines throughout Melbourne. Revealing the entanglement of process and end product, Dunnill is documented working through the slow stages of turning a nuisance plant into precious skeins of useable thread.
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Processing Plant was exhibited online as part of Radiant Pavilion 2021, and in West Space Window (Melbourne) 2–31 July 2022.
West Space Window installation: single channel video with sound (9 min 25 sec), moth vine found near Anstey Station, moth vine bast fibre.
Below: West Space Window documentation. All photographs by Janelle Low.
This project was supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.