Victoria Pham and Joel Sherwood Spring
“TERRA: Memory & Soil”
TERRA: Memory & Soil, is an immersive installation project combining sound, biological-sculpture, architecture and projection.
This collaboration between artists Victoria Pham and Joel Sherwood Spring brings together critical interdisciplinary positions within their respective disciplines of evolutionary biology and architecture, bringing vastly different insights into notions of the built environment, history and legacies of colonialism.
West Space Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones spoke to the artists on the occasion of the work's premiere at West Space, September 2022.
TERRA: Memory & Soil is a 2022 West Space Commission, presented in partnership with Liquid Architecture and Centre for Projection Art.
Victoria Pham is an Australian installation artist, composer, archaeologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a PhD Candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, holding the Cambridge Trust’s International Scholarship. As a composer she has studied with Carl Vine, Richard Gill, Liza Lim and Thierry Escaich. She is represented by the Australian Music Centre as an Associate Artist.
Joel Sherwood Spring Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands. He works collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology and desires for Indigeneity. Joel’s work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of our national identity and what today appear as 'progressive' identity formations. He explores the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land. He is learning how to employ art making, exhibition making, publishing, and pedagogy within what is recognised as black or Indigenous studies.