News · 23 May 2025

Bianca Tainsh Residency Blog 3

During a residency in Berlin in 2019, I invented my own Blueprint for Being – a document of personal principles to guide my artmaking and life decisions. My Blueprint has offered clarity in recognising consumeristic shaping and in making ethical decisions, even when they aren’t so popular. Often, when I detour from my principles… karma will nip me in the butt, reminding me to stay aligned with my real Self.

Blueprint for Being (Bianca Tainsh)
Principle no. 6: “Wherever possible, boycott plastic. Plastic is shit for everything.”

This leads me to the paradox of Myc-a. Created with all good intentions, Myc-a is an awe-inspiring work that people have deeply connected with – myself included. Considering the dogma of the pristine gallery, I severely broke with my no-plastic principle and designed Myc-a to be safe and fully self-sustaining by housing them within a large acrylic shell.

You could say that my subsequent bad karma was to grapple with the logistics of a 300kg living artwork. But I had also broken with vital aspects of the conceptual methodology that underpins all my current research.

I am uncomfortable with materialising current delusions that a divide exists between humans and non-humans. Myc-a thrives in their synthetic sphere, but it impedes the physical intimacy of intermingling, sensory bodies. Our bodies are not contained by our skin. We exhale, shed, and exude matter and energy – processes that sustain other bodies. Our exhaled carbon dioxide is sustenance, absorbed into plant and fungal bodies in exchange for life-sustaining oxygen. This is a bond of reciprocity that we have forgotten in the glare of our industrialised existence.

Myc-a, and the other terra-biomes that I initiate through my art, are portals for communing with nature – a word I do not often use, but offer now to open a doorway to alternate language. The word ‘nature’ has too often been used as an ideological blindfold to colonise, exploit, and extract. Instead, I prefer terms like more-than-human, advocating that we are in fact part of the natural biosphere.

Plastic barriers will make no appearances in the body of work that I am now producing through my Metro Arts residency. I think we all had enough of that with Covid. I want this work to engender intimate experiences between humans and terra-biomes – where human and biome become a document of each other and their shared relational encounters. As we are archives of our experiences through intellectual and embodied memory, so too are these other intelligent systems. Terra-biomes pulse with electrical communications, like our own bodies. They recognise individuals of their own species, and the myriads of other species they share their world with – including the humans they encounter. They are collective intelligence and eclectically relational.

My current research and collaboration with computing engineers at the University of Queensland has been focused on developing technology that reveals the agency and intelligent activity of these terra-biomes. Some of this technology will be woven into the body of my residency work, but it will only be a facet of the encounter. The more organic experience that the exhibition will offer is relationality, emerging from intuitive interaction. I am creating biome bodies that will share the same space – energy – air – particles – as the inquisitive human bodies that visit them in the gallery.

Your experience of this work will deepen and reconfigure with each visit over the 10 weeks of the exhibition. The biomes will grow and evolve – as will your relationship with them. And the mood of the space will shift through the presence of portals to the Lake Weyba landscape, the biomes’ place of origin.

This exhibition will be centred on intimate, visceral exchange and promises to release the sensorial body from the social and commercial shaping of contemporary Western terrains and expectations.