Queen Victoria Gardens

Spore your thoughts, speak your rhizomatic impulses and connect to an installation that poetically digests the planting of Queen Victoria Gardens

This workshop and installation by process-based artist Benjamin Woods asks us into the Pavilion to think about what’s underneath, in-between and blossoming in the shadows.

There are delicate mycelial webs, stretching and blooming beneath the manicured flower beds and lawns of Queen Victoria Gardens— enriching the soil, transporting nutrients to fungal bodies, and even helping trees communicate. Woods’ work will channel these mushroomed, ephemeral forces through sculpture, sound activations and fragments of botanical descriptions. And we’ll have the opportunity to translate these New Fruit Bodies ourselves—to discover modular modes and test soluble boundaries through our writing and speech. Finally, we’ll dissolve our poems in the Pavilion pond—sending our thoughts back into the bubbling lifecycle, leaving no physical trace.   

Collaborator

Benjamin Woods is an artist practicing in Naarm (Melbourne) and has been writing about and producing process-based sculptural and sonic artworks for the past 15 years. Their work explores the intersections between embodied listening, queer practices, emotion, and formation. Benjamin’s first essay book, Unimposing Form, is set to be published in late 2024.