In May 2018 I travelled to the Ediacara Hills to join a research trip led by Dr Jim Gehling, a Senior Research Scientist with the South Australian Museum who has been studying Ediacara fossils for decades. With his team, we visited fossil sites and got closer to their methods of study and current activities. 

The Ediacara Hills region has been known for its abundant fossilised remains since the 1940s, when the Australian geologist Reg Sprigg first discovered imprints in the rocks of the old Ediacara minefield while undertaking mineral exploration. The fossils preserved in the ancient sea floor in today’s Flinders Ranges record the first known multicellular animal life on Earth that predates the Cambrian. 

Sprigg’s discovery was ‘the first time the fossilised remains of an entire community of soft-bodied creatures had been found in such abundance anywhere in the world’ 1 and resulted in the naming of the Ediacaran Period (635–541 million years ago). While Ediacara fossil localities have since been discovered in Namibia, Russia, Newfoundland, Canada, United Kingdom and Siberia, the sites in Russia and Australia show the greatest diversity of fossil species. The findings in Australia also debunked a belief among the scientific community that ‘only organisms with hard parts, such as shells or skeletons, could be preserved in the fossil record.’2 Smothered by sand and silt, the soft-bodied organisms of the Ediacaran Period were preserved as mineral ‘death masks’. The fossils are the moulds and casts of their flattened bodies preserved as imprints in siltstone and sandstone layers. 

The Ediacaran are a curious group of multi-cellular organisms understood to be the first forms of complex life on Earth, predating the burgeoning and diverse life of the Cambrian age and distinguishable by their soft bodies. Despite having been studied for decades in various sites around the world, they reserve a sense of mystery for scientists, not being easily recognised as ancestors of animal life today. It is this mystery, the methodology of the scientific community, and their relentless effort to know, file and categorise, that are at the center of the installation.

Pleasures of association, and poissons, such as love– consists of a space enveloping  spiral installation of an evolutionary tree. It was created in dialogue with paleontologists Florian Witzmann and Daniela Schwarz.  The spiral structure in the exhibition presents ink rubbings on paper of fossil samples of the evolutionary process of 200 million years of vertebrate from water to flight (roughly from fish to bird). The tree does not include the human species, nor human time. Apart from the fact that humans did not exist then, this also reminds us that our existence does not state the end of evolution. However, we humans, have the privilege to be able to fantasize about evolution of the species, and thus create or even redesign the evolutionary order. This is the anthropocentric aspect of the creation of evolutionary tree that the exhibition and title negotiates.

The title Pleasures of association, and poissons, such as love–, is a twist of a diary note by geologist, zoologist and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, written during one of his expeditions as he developed his theory of natural selection of populations in 1838. Here he finds "… an analogy between pleasures of association, and pleasures such as love –"   in his comparative and connective work that led to "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life", 1859.

Hypothesis of a Tree (2016) addresses the divergent theories about time pursued across the studies of genetic data and paleontology. The spiralling bamboo structure is based on a phylogenetic tree that diagrams the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species based upon similarities and differences in their physical or genetic characteristics. From each of its 56 outer branches hangs a paper rubbing of fossil sediments representing a species.

The drawing technique used for the piece was borrowed from Merle Greene Robertson, an American archaeologist, who conducted extensive research in the Maya region and developed this method of paper rubbing using Japanese paper and ink, leading to the creation of around 5,000 images of monuments. Hypothesis of a Tree reunites the tangible materiality of fossils, which have left their imprint on stone, with the cybernetic study of genomes on the horizon.