Anika Gardner
Artists in residence for the month of June 2023
Anika is an emerging artist interested in the intersection between the disciplines of cognitive science and sculpture. With a sculptural background of bronze and metal, emphasising materiality and form, they are now shifting their practice to incorporate understandings and techniques gleaned from studies in cognitive science. Anika is interested in understanding the processes behind these current advancements, especially in relational dynamics and the role of biomimicry in our increasingly augmented lives.
In particular, how modelling from nature can be used to better integrate human and non-human networks instead of technological interfaces being sites of discordance with biological functionings. Anika is interested in embodiment within cognition and interfaces from the human and non-human perspective, and ways in which to co-inhabit machinic and biological spaces. This is pertinent in a time when robotics is on the precipice of a new understanding of life in soft-robotics and bio-robotics. Moving to a materiality of arduino and electronics, as well as keeping elements of metal work, Anika is just starting to embed and explore these ideas within their practice whilst furthering their knowledge base through studies.
Anika completed a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Visual) at Flinders University and is currently studying a degree in Cognitive Science, minoring in Mathematics at Flinders University. Across the course of study Anika has been involved in a number of projects, most notably exhibitions in South Australia and a series of small bronze public art works for the City of Adelaide and the Department of Transport and Infrastructure. Anika was a recipient of the Helpmann Academy Graduate Award 2019 and Helpmann/City Rural Travel Award 2019. In 2021 Anika was awarded the Goolwa Public Art project by Helpmann, which they are currently working on, and a residency at George Street Studios in 2022. In February 2023 Anika undertook a residency at AADK in Blanca, Spain and a video work for FeltDark Adelaide, Australia. In May 2023 Anika had a solo exhibition for Post Office Projects, Adelaide, Australia where they explored the concept of tactile interfaces.
About the exhibition in Deiglan gallery 24 and 25 of June 2023.
Vacuole: from vacuus (latin) meaning empty, a vacuole is a cavity in our tissue…
This exhibition is a series of objects and video in dialogue with the diffuse boundaries of flesh, machine, human, non-human permeating our lives. In reference to research in soft-robotics, biobots and AI, the works use arduino electronics and the organic polymer latex to infuse a sense of mechanic and biological life into the objects. In the part-laboratory space, breath, a heartbeat and the electronic metronome act in discord.
Whereas once machines were seen as empty, devoid of being, these works try to dislodge that innate assumption, and herald a new era of machinic, organic co-understandings.
