Murray Art Museum Albury presents The Visitors (An exercise in Plant Agency), an artistic exploration of human being’s relationship with plants. Multidisciplinary artists Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline invite us to reconsider how we interact with the plant world - instead of using plants for our own gain; they propose practical ways in which we can prioritise the needs of plants above our own.

Instead of just doing things to plants could we do things for them, or even with them? Could we become agents for plants? Real estate agents? Travel agents? Secret agents?

The installation presents a kind of mobile training camp containing various devices and props to assist in the practice of ‘plant agency’, together with a video projection of the artists using these plant-empowering devices and acting as plant agents.

The artists will undertake a residency at the Albury Botanic Gardens as part of this exhibition and lead workshops with high school students to produce a Plant Agency Manual that will help the rest of us experiment with these techniques outside the Museum.

_{Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline 
The Visitors ( An exercise in Plant Agency), 2017
Cypress & gum trees, biodegradable plastic, soil, plant seeds, steel, leather, construction scrim, video.
Installation view, Blue Mountains City Art Gallery
Photo: silversalt photography
Image courtesy the artists}

About the Artists

Multidisciplinary artists Heidi Axelsen and Hugo Moline work across architecture, installation, social process and situated public art. Through an interest in modes of mobility, occupation and ownership, their work engages with specific places and asks if the social, political and ecological relationships could be re-framed or re-arranged. They make objects, shelters, vehicles, tools and devices not as end products in themselves but as ‘props’ to catalyse the formation of new relationships within a particular place or process.