Jiann was a recipient of ANAT’s inaugural CSIRO Synapse residency where she worked with chemists to curate rot. Using ancient practices of innoculation, cultivation and fermentation, she introduced mushrooms to the hyper-hollow nanostructures of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Tending these speculative kinships, she witnessed the biosynthesising of MOFs within growing fungi bodies. Caring for Curious Ecologies extended Jiann’s ongoing practice of exploring human, non-human, and technological entanglements, unsettling bodily boundaries and making strange intra-actions perceptible.

“Context is what I hope my artistic research and non-scientific experiments will bring to the understanding of MOFs.”

Swollen shrivels, 2017. Credit: Jiann Hughes.

Dr Jiann Hughes is a Sydney based artist researcher who works across the forms of installation, participatory practice, social process and situated public art. Her approach is collaborative, shaped by an aesthetic of care and the material practices of many bodies. She creates speculative fabulations to toy with methods of influence and dynamics of power. An enduring theme in her work has been the challenging of accepted truths about bodily boundaries, revealing what comes to matter in these entanglements.

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