Tones of Shimmer
2022

The shimmer, in Deborah Bird Rose’s essay, ‘Shimmer: When All you Love is Being Trashed’, describes the waves of invisible forces that surround and enable life, the flow of ancestral power in a collaborative, multi-species matrix. It reminds us that every ‘thing’ exists only through and in relation. There are no edges without the spaces in between.

How can we practice this understanding? Can we wrap words and objects around the idea to better know it?

Shimmer through music
Shimmer exists in the iridescence of music. When sound waves travel through the air, certain combinations of pitch, volume, tone, reverberation, rhythm, distance, will rise to create momentary harmonies, experienced as song. The song is not an object; it is the spirit or life-force that comes into being in the space between the singer and those that hear.

Shimmer as a seed
Shimmer can also be witnessed and imagined as a single seed responding to the combination of earth, air, water, nutrients, light, heat, fire, neighbour: a single seed at the confluence of many factors which enable it to open, sprout and grow. Where there are barriers, hard surfaces, life will shift into the cracks, and the seed will press through into light.

Shimmer as object
Tones of Shimmer acts first as a lure, drawing the eye with the attraction of a pollinator. Then, somewhere between the light source, its refraction and the walls and surfaces that catch them, there is a glimpse of this glimmering reflection, opening ways to consider our position in the deep, relational story of being, and our commitment to the ‘yes’ of life.

First shown through New Australian Design at Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 2022

All enquiries via Sophie Gannon Gallery.

Photos of Tones of Shimmer - surface by Sara Maiorino

Tones of Shimmer - pendant made with the generous assistance of Azoogi LED Lighting

Words with Jennifer Mills

From Designing Mythology

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.