Dr Perdita Phillips is an Australian ecological artist who has long concerned herself with interactions between human and nonhuman worlds. A recipient of State Government arts grants, two Australia Council Inter-Arts grants and Artsource residencies in Basel and Sydney, she has inhabited/exhibited widely including Listening in the Anthropocene online exhibition, (2020, Charles Stuart University), Dealing with the runoff, a walk with a historian and an engineer for the Vancouver Arts Festival (2019), Invisible monsters: A tour of Perth’s underground pollution (Perth 2018), Make Known: The Exquisite Order of Infinite Variation (2018, UNSW Galleries), Here&Now2018: Besides, it is always the others who die (2018, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery), Frankenstein GRID (Stanford University outdoor projection festival, 2018), Incinerator Art Award (2017, Incinerator Gallery), Another Green World (2017, Western Plains Cultural Centre), Objectillogica – a modern Wunderkammer (2017, Holmes à Court Gallery), enhancement: MAKING SENSE (Universidade do Porto, 2016), Radical Ecologies (PICA, 2016), fieldwork/fieldwalking (PhD exhibition Moores Building Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006) and Four Tales from Natural History (solo, PICA, 2004). Published books include Fossil III (2019, as part of the Lost Rocks project) and Birdlife (with Nandi Chinna, Michael Farrell, Graeme Miles, and Nyanda Smith) with Lethological Press.
What does Hatched mean to you?’
Being selected for The Original National Graduate Show in 1992 was the beginning of my professional career. With societal and economic attrition, the number of graduates from art schools still practicing after thirty years are few. Looking back at the cast of the artist’s body in compost and the use of living material in the Earthworm Culture Unit in the original exhibition, there is undoubtedly a certain rawness in the forms. But I also see that art concerned with the environment, for many years marginalised, has come full circle—back into vivid concern in Australian art.
I have been in eleven solo and group shows at PICA, as well as contributing to other talks and panels over the years. That’s not bad for a shy girl from the ‘burbs. I started off as PICA member number 007. Noel Sheridan let me use a back room for my first solo show as a second year student at Curtin University, and I worked as an assistant to Jill Barker for the Bookworks Exhibition in 1989 and David Watt for “The Classroom” in A Spacious Central Location in 1990. I am humbled and pleasured that within many of the curatorial themes engaged with, of the repeated reference to living forms and wild and lithic vibrancy, that have been woven into the creative projects I have shown inside these gallery walls.
It’s great to see the high profile that Hatched now has in 2021.
