Tenets of Warawana Mythologies
2024
At the core of any organised culture there is a collection of rules or values. Three tenets sit at the bedrock of Warawana mythology;
all matter are creating equal
the world is made of relative
time is queer, Place is present
Their meaning can be interpreted in mutable ways depending on context, but reflection and expression of their meaning remains core to all cultural expressions. The text included to describe each of the tenets are taken from multiple sources and referenced where possible.
all matter are creating equal
Glass, stone, brass, copper, leather, timber, steel
If we can suspend the devaluing that happens in the sub and conscious process of othering of anything that is other-than-human we can get glimpses of a planet alive with sentience and agency. Moving well-beyond the ‘us vs them’ mentality we are able to recognise the ‘shimmer’ of this planet and slip past any hierarchy of pattern or the materials that make them. Knowing that all matter are creating equally illustrates the entanglement of planetary processes and gives all things in their current form agency to be - in relation.
These ideas are in part expressed through the philosophical lens known as New Materialism; By considering the nonhuman’s capabilities, new materialists undermine human exceptionalism and the assumption that only we have agency. Viewing everything as matter, and all matter as powerful, New Materialism refuses to treat humans as more than material, refuses that humans are separate from and superior to the world around us. ‘Vibrant Matter- A Political Ecology of Things’ Jane Bennett, 2010.
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The matter that we are, that makes all that we know, coalesced and began its deep time exchange 6 billion years ago. The Weaver, attuned to these conversations of matter, has listened and tended to them. Caressed, shepherded, woven them into forms known and otherwise. How do we give prominence to the agency of matter to understand the ancient kinship of everything that makes Earth.
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Made with Tom Rowney and James Young during ‘designer in residence’ at Canberra Glassworks 2024
the world is made of relative
Glass, mirror
… it is always the relation that allows ‘beingness’.
Consider how it is not the individual but the combined effort of entities; quarks, atoms, molecules, that allows for the making of matter and the shifts of scale. That it is the collaboration, or the combining, the collective that makes the world, from one nested-scale to the next. Through the action of the Weaver, it is the patterns, matter in relation that are the way the world is made.
Through the ever-weaving of matter, the world is made of relative, known and otherwise.
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Can we be more attentive to our own porosity to know that all matter is made in relationship to its neighbour - shifting, transforming, warping, wefting in constant imperceptible exchange? These bodies we think of as ‘ours’ are just borrowed, a passing mist-like agreement of molecules and onwards through nested scales.
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Made with Hannah Gason during ‘designer in residence’ at Canberra Glassworks 2024
time is queer, Place is present
Glass, aluminium, ink
In any instance you occupy poly-temporal scales. These include time at a ‘you’-scale ‘this moment’, time at a species-scale ‘cultural practice’, time at a geological-scale, time at an atomic-scale. These are a few of the myriad layered time variants that we move within and experience either consciously or not. While our perceptions of time is mostly linear, practising belonging to other-than-human time-scales allows for the movement through time into ‘past’ and ‘future’ and ‘parallel’ realities of time from the perspective of other entities. Recalibrating to the reality of polytemporal states allows us to dissolve into the queer reality that we occupy and the cellular cosmology this offers.
Meanwhile(s), Place is always present. You are always in relation to the expressions of matter that you are adjacent to, although - as the Eucalypt doesn’t think of itself as not itself as it’s pollen travels on the nose of the pollinating bat - our edges are misty and in constant exchange, so while Place is always in relation to you, its boundaries are not clearly defined.
From MYTHICA IGNOTA Artefacts of the Oscillocene and Warawana Mythologies
Designing Mythology is a questioning and proposal for old ways / new to exist as humans, using the process of 'mything' to reorientate back towards the planet, and recalibrate our value systems by dismantling the current shadow metaphors of the Western-colonial worldview. It proposes the restorying of scientific perspectives to offer a cosmology that includes humans as part of the living world whilst simultaneously removing us from the centre. Thus a recognition and return, via a circuitous route, to the worldviews, deep connection and sustainment of the first peoples of our planet.
Photographer Brenton McGeachie courtesy of Canberra Glassworks and Pew Pew Studio
Acquisition inquiries via Sophie Gannon Gallery
