Looking back at this work and forward to my current practice, I’m imagining multispecies publics, places where multiple lifeforms can gather, be together, and touch each other.
Linda Tegg’s work explores the world as natural made cultural (and cultural made natural again) through her ecological interventions. Much of her practice brings animals and plants into human-built spaces in unexpected and visually compelling ways. Her projects Grasslands (2014) in Australia and Infield in Sweden (2020) return city sites back to the verdant places they once were by installing native grasses in ways that create impromptu, seasonal landscapes. In doing so, Tegg’s works reconnect places with the creatures that historically formed them over time, and, in turn, people with those places and creatures long lost to the swell of urban development. By reintroducing diverse species temporarily, Tegg’s living installations feel almost illusory, evoking a sense of wonder and inviting us to reconsider what our connections to place and non human persons have been and could be. — AY
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Grasslands
2014
Infield
2020
In the summer of 2020, I shifted the ground at the entrance of the ArkDes (Sweden’s national center for architecture and design) from asphalt car park, to a biodiverse meadowland that will accumulate life over the season. Humans are invited to join this assemblage, and spend time amongst the thousands of plants and other life forms (birds, insects, fungi) to simply experience being together in a shared time and place. The familiar plants are representative of Sweden’s infield meadows. An infield sits between worlds. If abandoned, it returns to forest or lost to the processes of industrialization and urbanism. In pre-modern times, it was at center the of the agricultural system that transformed Europe. In the contemporary condition, an infield is a remnant of that organizing structure — a space where intensive human plant interactions can be seen as positively associated with biodiversity. Sweden’s remnant infields are among the most species rich plant communities on Earth. — LT
Artist Reflection —
About Linda Tegg
Linda Tegg is an Australian artist who makes work out of inhabiting and reconfiguring the conditions of spectatorship. Within her immersive installations, plants, animals, images, and the built environment are brought into unlikely proximities to generate new points of orientation and relation. This speculative work questions the impulses and methods used to frame the world as resource and seeks new forms of coexistence. Tegg’s artwork engages with cultural institutions as well as public space and has been widely exhibited in Australia, the United States, and Europe. In 2018, Tegg was the Co-Creative Director, with Baracco+Wright Architects, of “Repair,” the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.