Anna Madeleine Raupach. Juried Artist
As Above, So Below
QUT Art Museum
Artist Statement
The Slow Violence series depicts maps of Australia’s 2019/2020 Black Summer bushfires in the Blue Mountains, the South Coast of NSW, Namadgi National Park, and Eastern Victoria, embroidered into emergency thermal blankets.
These pieces compile satellite imagery gathered from emergency service applications, the Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Map, and state and national open-source datasets of fire damage to vegetation. The resulting shapes combine scientific and personal resources and aesthetics to interpret extreme weather events through a materialisation of data. Designed to retain body heat and as a potential signaling device, the thermal blanket conveys fire as both restorative and catastrophic and the slow technique of stitching encompasses a repetitive and meditative practice that simultaneously destroys and repairs this grounding substrate.
The term ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) refers to invisible implications of climate change that are temporally and spatially removed from sites of immediate destruction. In these works, the accumulated time and labour of individual actions dissolve to envelop the viewer in vibrant pattern as satellite imagery converges with a human scale. Through a tactile exploration of temporality and scale, they interweave personal experience and planetary forces to express a crisis both urgently present and crucially delayed.
About the artists
Anna Madeleine Raupach is a multidisciplinary artist and Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art & Design (SOA&D). Her research engages with science and technology to address socio-political issues enmeshed with climate change. Anna has a PhD in Media Arts from UNSW Art & Design (2014); a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from ANU School of Art & Design (2007); and in 2024 she will undertake a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Her recent research has evolved through an ANAT Synapse Residency with ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Mount Stromlo Observatory; a Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Fellowship Program; and an artwork commission for The Tellus Project led by UNSW Art & Design and the National Herbarium NSW.
Anna has had solo exhibitions in New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Bandung and has been awarded international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, through the Art Gallery of NSW (2018) and Common Room Network Foundation, Indonesia, with Asialink Arts (2017). Her work has been selected for significant national and international exhibitions including the Ramsay Art Prize (2021), Art Gallery of South Australia, FLIGHT, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and Sun Thinking, with the Solar Protocol Network.
Credits: Anna Madeleine Raupach