The Great Lakes Algae Organ (2016) a bicycle propelled street organ that grows and displays living spirulina algae. Audiences are invited to enjoy live organ music while engaging with a live algae colony. The organ becomes a talking point to discuss algae’s many roles as a superfood, as the largest producer of oxygen in our atmosphere, as a possible source of biofuel, and as an invasive species infesting waters in The Great Lakes. People are invited to crank the street organ and view living samples of algae under the microscope. It is an absurdist object – connecting the science and […]

Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly have collaborated on a project-by-project basis since they met whilst both artists in residency at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia in 2004.  They have trained together in vitro tissue culture techniques, performed non-human ‘animality’ with cell cultures, they have climbed into aseptic work environments disorientating scientific scrutiny, and have folded and unfolded bodily refigurations in various laboratory settings.

My practice relies on the basic argument that the laboratory is in fact a complicated ecology directly linked to the earth’s planetary ecology. When I enter a biological lab I see a carefully balanced relationship between a variety of organisms (and parts of organisms) inhabiting a shared environment: animal and human research subjects, cells, bacteria, enzymes, plants, the scientists themselves, and even unwanted contaminants engaging in mutually beneficial and mutually detrimental relationships. The lab is not the sterile work environment we see reflected back to us in popular media but in fact teaming with life, hot and fragile and fragrant. […]

Arctic Labscapes (2013-Currently) is a series of new performances, videos and photographs, traveling with lab equipment and specimens from ‘the South’ engaging arctic cultures and landscapes through performance and bioart discourses. In July 2013 I traveled with Dr. Shannon Bell to Pangnirtung Nunavut to join Dr. Peter Kulchyski and his University of Manitoba summer school program living and working with a local Inuit community on Baffin Island. During our time in the North we participated in a variety of educational, community and cultural experiences including: home visits with local elders, Inuktitut classes, a seminar on Artic botany, and hunting, fishing, food […]

Biotechnology is a Technology of Love… originates from my experience of human, interspecies and universal sensations of love working in laboratories, in gardens, kitchens, in my family, bioart and art communities, as well as hiking and camping in the outdoors.In this work, the letters L-O-V-E are cut out of leather and felt scraps and placed into petri dishes, and agar is poured over the letters. Of course, the letters are filled with microbes that bloom overnight in the incubator. The petri dishes are arraigned in a similar formulation to Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1967) and photographed.