Living and working on unceded Wallumedegal land, Lachlan Bell (he/him) is graduating with a B Design/Media (PR & Advertising) and integrates analogue and digital techniques through his textile, photographic and installation work. Pursuing tangental interests across archives, scientific journals, folklore and local history, Lachlan explores his third-generation Estonian background through collaborative investigations into memory loss, mistranslation and the importance of storytelling through the latent materiality of cloth and fibre.
In remixing, re-contextualising, and renegotiating familial histories, his works often share similar references and themes around parafictions, antagonism, discomfort and warped chronology. Works are neither static nor removed from the situational context in which they were made, and his archive of works seek to reflect a zeitgeist under constant scrutiny. Lachlan is currently undertaking a residency with Kudos Studios and working as Research Assistant for UNSW A&D Lecturer Clare Milledge.
'Call and Response' reminisces on corrupted messages, 11am pressers, crop circles and bureaucratic futurity.
Evocative of fields of wheat and early computing punched cards, the Ghiordes knotting used depicts a three-minute interstellar radio message sent in 1974 from the now-decommissioned Arecibo Observatory and the Arecibo answer 'hoax' received in 2001 near Chilbolton radio telescope in the UK.
Expected to arrive in the globular star cluster M13 in the year 26,974 CE, thanks to its low image resolution, the message becomes practically illegible and indecipherable to extra-terrestrials attaching any meaning to it. Traditional Scandinavian rya/rüiu/ryijy short pile knotting, once used to make knotted pile bedcovers for mariners, is utilised to consider what humanity looks like to a galaxy 22,180 light years away.
Beyond the messages unashamedly naïve optimism and form over function, the message becomes a call to action for ourselves, asking us what comfort can we find knowing we are alone when the universe constantly leaves our messages on seen.
Evocative of fields of wheat and early computing punched cards, the Ghiordes knotting used depicts a three-minute interstellar radio message sent in 1974 from the now-decommissioned Arecibo Observatory and the Arecibo answer 'hoax' received in 2001 near Chilbolton radio telescope in the UK.
Expected to arrive in the globular star cluster M13 in the year 26,974 CE, thanks to its low image resolution, the message becomes practically illegible and indecipherable to extra-terrestrials attaching any meaning to it. Traditional Scandinavian rya/rüiu/ryijy short pile knotting, once used to make knotted pile bedcovers for mariners, is utilised to consider what humanity looks like to a galaxy 22,180 light years away.
Beyond the messages unashamedly naïve optimism and form over function, the message becomes a call to action for ourselves, asking us what comfort can we find knowing we are alone when the universe constantly leaves our messages on seen.
