The Georges Mora Fellowship aims to encourage the development of art in Australia by providing artists with the resources to explore fresh thinking and to research progressive ideas.
The 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship has been awarded to Rosie Isaac, whose research-based sculpture, writing, and performance practice focuses on the power relations embedded in language and other social institutions. Isaac is interested in art making as a form of attention, one that might imagine different material and social futures.
Artist Rosie Isaac. Courtesy the artist and the Georges Mora Fellowship
For the 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship, Isaac will develop her project A stored charge: a material study of electrical technologies and embodied futures, which explores the materiality of electricity and how electrification, and more recently battery technology, shapes social and political imagination. The project will challenge the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, considering how metallic elements are absorbed and used within the body and how our nervous system functions electrically.
Rosie Isaac, Conjugated backbone crossed section, 2022. Photograph: Carmen-Sibha Keiso. Courtesy the artist and the Georges Mora Fellowship
Beginning with materiality, the stuff of electricity, Isaac will weave the social, political, and speculative possibilities out of it. Batteries store chemical energy that is converted to electricity, allowing EVs to replace petrol cars or store sun for cloudy days. Batteries carry optimism – they are a technological solution to the climate crisis. But inevitably, there are environmental and human costs to extracting the materials required to produce this “miracle.” In this project, Isaac frames the battery as a silver bullet, symbolic of a desire for technology that will save us from climate catastrophe. Throughout the Fellowship, Isaac will research the 18th-century discovery of electricity and its production as “magic” and spectacle, examining the electrochemical processes that allow battery materials (lithium, graphite) to store, release and then recapture power.
