Ilam Campus Gallery exhibition: Radicant

Exhibition opening 5pm, Wednesday 28 May

Meticulously detailed botanical models crafted from papier-mâché, glass beads, gelatin, and feathers form the starting point for Bellamy and Fauteux’s video work, Radicant. Originally manufactured by the Brendel Company in Berlin in the late nineteenth century, these models were purchased by the University of Otago as vital teaching aids in biology and botany. In this work, individual models are transposed using 3D scanning and CAD technologies into a virtual space, accompanied by the words and voice of Colleen Coco Collins, who weaves the stories of each plant and fungus represented, illuminating them as multi-layered and unique characters and tracing the long roots of our relationships to plants and fungi.

This work was developed by Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux during their 2024 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and was commissioned and first presented by Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka

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Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux are partners and collaborators who share time living within the traditional territory of Mi’kma’ki known as Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, and in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), Aotearoa (New Zealand). Through interdisciplinary outcomes, their work considers human entanglements with other animals, plants, fungi, and minerals, and is informed by site-specific research. They have exhibited their work in Aotearoa, Canada, and the USA including recent solo exhibitions Radicant at Hocken Gallery (Ōtepoti, Aotearoa, 2025), and Collective at MSVU Art Gallery (Kjipuktuk, 2024). They were the 2024 Frances Hodgkins Fellows at the University of Otago in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa.

Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mi'kma'ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux would like to thank Colleen Coco Collins, Dr. Pamela Cornes and Dr. Janice Lord, the Department of Botany - University of Otago, Dr. Greg Holwell and the McGregor Museum - The University of Auckland, YYZ Artists Outlet, Struts Gallery, and Hocken Collections The Uare Taoka o Hākena.

The artists acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Exhibition ends Wednesday 18 June.