Melinda Hetzel, Artistic Director of her eponymous collective, is determined to marry technology back to the natural realm with her ethereal new work Between the Trees at Stonnington’s annual Glow Winter Arts Festival.
In an entertainment-saturated world, provoking wonder from an audience is no mean feat. Stonnington’s Glow Winter Arts Festival sticks out on the national arts and lights circuit as more than just a luminous spectacle, by fostering truly high concept art from Melbourne’s most cutting-edge creatives.
Melinda Hetzel is a rule breaker by default. Her multimedia practice has evolved through the wordless dimensions of visual theatre to hybridised performance visual art set in public spaces. Hetzel’s contribution to this year’s Glow Festival, Between the Trees is inspired by mycelium: the network of fungal threads (known individually as hypha) associated with tree roots. The filamentous hyphae communicate with plants in complex and continually mystifying ways.
“We describe it as the internet of the forest: the beautiful idea of connectivity that you can’t see,” Hetzel explains.
Between the Trees is otherworldly, melding live plant material with touch technology to form a collaborative musical instrument. It repurposes hanging glowing lights from parts of a previous work, the augmented reality of Urban Cocoon, as touch sensitive nodes. Inside these spherical nodes are two meticulously designed halves, representing an inverted mycelial node, magnified many times from what would be seen under the ground. Intricate subterranean structures lie below, while on top, small circular cut-outs of different forest floor ecosystems manifest the visible elements of the mycelium organism.
“When you touch the ecospheres it triggers the light and sound and thus forms the collaborative musical instrument. The tiny little patches are connected by people playing the installation. They all play different parts and you can play with everyone there,” Hetzel explains.
Context is as much part of Hetzel’s work as any of its functioning parts, and so Glow Festival hosts Mycelium’s first iteration for more than just convenient timing – the idyllic Malvern public gardens site was carefully scouted to find a certain tree. “This particular tree we found is a holly-oak, one that has a symbiotic relationship with truffles, which are connected by mycelium. The relationship between it and the other type of trees [on-site] then become the context of the work,” Hetzel says.
“We’ve got this beautiful canopy over the big old tree – it’s almost like entering a child-like cubby world underneath, then engaging in this artwork from our perspective. I’m interested in the conversation that’s broader than those who are likely to go to a traditional theatre or gallery. It’s not the same people all the time.”
Though her collective is possessed by new technologies, they’re invariably intertwined with the natural world; something they believe helps to incrementally overcome the trappings of isolation and ironically, disconnectedness.
“I’m fascinated by how we continue to evolve and exist in the quite unnatural environment that we create, particularly in an urban context. I try not to condemn change and technology as evil – I strive to see the creative potential in that.”
