Acid free archival paper offered to a snail farm, to consider other processes. By shifting coordinates and perspectives, objects reveal themselves, and by collecting, documenting and deciphering findings, I hope to gather enough data to learn something fundamental.
Some changes in our environment are not perceptual to the human eye; they hide in objects, decomposing and recomposing only to be observed over vast time. These experiments and proposals seek knowledge from the ground, and alternative futures for our fragile present.
Threads For Lost Mothers, or how she gained a Masters of Economics by Hanna Scott
A text in response to a mothermother project presentation at the Aotearoa Art Fair, November 2022
“Tozer’s creative gesture is economical, the snails digest, reconstitute and pigment the paper. In what might appear at first blush to be a Dada-esque or Surreal gesture, her works instead chart ‘changes in our environment that are not perceptible to the human eye.’ Her minimalist interventions shift coordinates, or points of view. She suggests that ‘by collecting, documenting and deciphering my findings, I hope to gather enough data to learn something fundamental.’ Surrealists regarded snails as usefully creepy and disjunctive, but these slow-moving hermaphrodites offer another way to consider time, and motherhood.”
National Contemporary Art Award, 2021, Waikato Museum, Judged by Karl Chitham
Artwork details:
Companion Pieces Triptych, archival paper given to a snail farm to digest (2021)