Webbing

As a continuation of research into human/more-than-human entanglements, Webbing attends to collaboration and materiality through the unification of the industrial and natural within the exhibition space. In Webbing, spiders act as co-creators in the construction of an installation that interweaves the static infrastructure of exclusion and the poetics of the web. Over the course of the exhibition, these spiders engage with the industrial infrastructures of the exhibition space, creating a series of unique meshworks, or taking leave from making.

The artificial bird netting reads against the silk of the spider’s webs, illuminating material and conceptual dichotomies of containment and exclusion, nature and industry. The spider’s web can be read as an extension of the sensorial body — feeling outward into the world and encouraging feeling and thinking as entangled with human and more-than-human actors.

The durational and ‘active’ aspects to this work are key - manifesting over an extended period, Webbing encourages visitors to contemplate, revisit and mark the passage of time against the temporalities of the spider.

Please note this exhibition hosts Rock orb-weaving Spiders (Argiope mascordi). These spiders are non-poisonous and of mild temperament. We ask that all visitors respect their space and agency as they undertake their weavings.

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Webbing - Field Notes

Free Public Program Sat 15 July 2-3pm

Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse

This program guides participants through the Nicholas Building in a consideration of key themes unfurled and entangled in the scope of the exhibition Webbing. Lead by artists Jaxon Waterhouse and Chantelle Mitchell, participants will be encouraged and supported in developing field notes that attend to human/more-than-human encounters and infrastructures within the exhibition space and beyond. Engaged in observation, reflection and speculation, participants will become entangled in the many narrative webs seeded across the site.

Beginning in the Blindside gallery, and with the assistance of our more-than-human collaborators, Argiope mascordi inhabiting the exhibition space, this program attempts to weave its way across site. Equipped with guides and notational equipment, participants in this public program will wander with the arts through the building before arriving at a dedicated space for a screening of John Woodman’s 1979 short film, Spider.

Details:

2pm Meet at BLINDSIDE Gallery (Level 7)

Guided walk and talk through Nicholas Building

Screening at Laneway Learning (Level 3, Room 14)

* Seating available for 30 people

Register online

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Eight Strands

Johanna Ellersdorfer

I.

On a bridge in a place now called Canberra, translucent webs criss-cross between metal beams on the low rails that run alongside the pedestrian footpath. Illuminated by the dim under-rail lighting, they look like a long slender line of glowing nets. Through them I glimpse the inky water below. Gentle ripples flicker as they catch the light, lapping against the pylons. As I walk past, my hand brushes up against a loose thread that wraps itself around my fingers. It is soft and sticky and I flick my hand until it catches onto something else and I feel it slide away. Later, back at home, I see the sticky clump of threads has formed a warm grey line across the dark fabric of my jeans. As I peel it off the ends float in the air. I feel it fall apart as I rub it between my fingers.

II.

An orb weaver, like those on the bridge, spins its webs with silk and air. It will pull twenty or so threads from the silk glands on its abdomen, which are then carried by air currents until they catch on solid surfaces, forming the base structure of a web. The spider will then spin concentric circles from the outside in, ending at the centre where a stickier fibre will be laid to catch prey.

III.

On walks, I often see webs that hang in mid-air, spirals of floating translucent thread, seemingly disconnected. Sometimes a large spider will be sitting still in its centre, the threads splaying out from its rounded body like a radial frame. If I pause and follow these lines, I can often trace them to branches and fences, or walls and poles, solid structures functioning as a make-shift loom. Sometimes the line will simply dissolve into the night sky.

IV.

Webs are ambiguous objects, like nets and sieves—devices that both filter and trap.1 In many cultures, nets have been associated with mystical qualities, and used to symbolise second sight. Sometimes, at the centre of a spider’s web, I will notice insects wrapped in thread like precious amulets amongst rows of parallel lines and chevrons.

I read that in the 18th century, webs were used as symbols of poetic composition, representing the process of collecting threads of thought from different sources and weaving them together to form a new whole. When I mention this to a friend who is studying a book from this time, she tells me that throughout the manuscript, the writer has sketched small inky webs amongst passages of copied text.

Now webs are most ubiquitously used to describe the internet—seemingly infinite reams of information connected by electronic nodes. The web models a world as a network, shaped not as a linear chain, but as a mesh in which all times coexist.

1 Baert, Barbara, 2019. About Sieves and Sieving: Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm. De Gruyter: Berlin.

V.

Spiders usually construct their webs away from humans, and they mostly do this at night. In a moment of chance almost four hundred years ago, a spider constructed its web inside the dark tube of a telescope. An Italian astronomer glimpsed the fine threads as he gazed through the lens into space, and noted their potential. After some experimentation, he began using spider silk as cross-hairs. Compared to other materials that were used at the time, like human hair and silver wire, spider silk was so fine that it could pinpoint the stars without obscuring them.

By the 19th century spider silk was used as cross-hairs on all kinds of optical devices, including microscopes and theodolites. By the second world war, it was also used for the cross-hairs on gunsights and range finders.

VI.

At the same time spider silk was routinely being collected for cross-hairs, a Jesuit missionary from France invented a device that could wind silk from the abdomen of the Madagascan golden orb spider. Ominously called a ‘guillotine’, the device comprised a rounded pole that the spider was tied to, rendering it helpless so that strands of silk from its abdomen could be spun onto a small swift. The extracted silk was used to weave a spider-silk bed canopy that was exhibited in Paris as an explicit symbol of French colonial power.

The project was not entirely considered a success. Forced into captivity, the spiders collectively spun an impermeable wall to contain themselves. Having shut out their human captors but also their insect food sources, they then began eating each other until only a few extremely large spiders remained.

The bed canopy promptly vanished after the exhibition and has never been seen again.

VII.

A few years ago, a shawl and cape were woven from the same species of golden orb spider in Madagascar. Using a similar contraption to the one that had been used over a century earlier, golden threads were extracted from over seventy spiders and woven to create two garments that shimmer in the dim light of the museum vitrines that encase them.

VIII.

My mind wanders back to the spider bridge in the place now called Canberra. I no longer live there, and it has been months since I along walked that path. Although most spiders are solitary, the orb weavers that enmesh the railings there will tolerate each other and even allow neighbouring webs to interlock. I try to recall the first time I saw these webs, how they changed over time, through seasons, but it blurs into a single moment. All I remember is the glittering mesh of lines connecting metal bars and thinking how much it looked like lace.

Johanna Ellersdorfer reads, writes and sometimes makes books on Gadigal land. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of Sydney.