Mapping Extinctions explores beyond-the-human timescales by speculating on how we might map nature and wildlife during geologic upheaval. Soon the only way to experience wildlife will be through web videos. The work takes as its starting point the devastating effects of the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires which burned 11 million hectares and killed 5 billion animals. Dis-located drawings of animals reference the dispassionate specimen drawings made by botanists sailing on early colonial sailing ships, and their blue colour is a deliberate pun on the idea of recording something in perpetuity – as a form of blueprint should animal cloning become a possibility. The lost orientation of the animals in Mapping Extinctions comments on the long-term impacts of colonisation on Indigenous lands, enacted through the catastrophic effects of bushfires that occur more frequently due to improper land knowledge and management.   

Mapping Extinctions takes a speculative, more-than-human ontological position and uses inefficient mapping as an experimental cartographic practice and non-representational methodological protocol for attuning to the subaltern genealogies of sites and places.

Exhibitions:

9/2022. Invited submission. Solastalgia and Tomorrow. With Belinda Broughton, Rosalind Crisp, Karena Goldfinch, Carol Hudson, Linda Knight, Pip McManus, Bridget Nicholson, Gaye Shield and Micheal Shirrefs. Climarte Gallery, Bridge Road, Richmond, Melbourne, Australia. 12 Sept – 1 Oct 2022. https://climarte.org/project/solastalgia-tomorrow/

5/2022. Invited submission. TENANCY: an exhibition by Seven Artist Collective. With Alison Kennedy, Amanda Lamming, Chris Fontana, Mimmalisa Trifilo, Nina Sanadze, Tracey Lamb, Zoe Arnott, Carolyn Cardinet, Chelle Destefano, Felicity Gordon, Julie Shiels, Karima Baadilla, Kate Stewart, lynn mowson, Nanou Dupuis, Paula Hunt, Rebecca Willcox, Renee Borders. A pop-up exhibition, Carlisle Street Balaclava, Melbourne, Australia. 27-29 May 2022.

24/7/2021. Invited submission. This is not a mandate: an international survey of women and non-binary artists. Instagallery #thisis_nota_mandate.

Talks:

14/2/2020. Artist talk: Inefficient Mapping for Attuning to Phenomena. Experimenting with thought in a more-than-human Anthropocene Research colloquium, AARE Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research. Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, Australia.

2022. Cover image: Singer, H., Dunn, A., Verlie, B., Lavau, S., & Laird, T. (Eds.) Hacking the Anthropocene: Do-It-Together (DIT). Feral Feminisms, 10(Fall 2021) www.feralfeminisms.com

4/8/21. Artist talk: Inefficiently counter-mapping climate change. A climate of change: creative counter-mapping methods for sensing place. Centre for Art and Social Transformation, RMIT University https://cast.org.au/podcasts/

Publications:

Knight, L. (2023). Inefficiently mapping extinction: A research-creation, practice-led approach to visualising biodiversity loss. Research in Education, online release, 1-15. Doi: 10.1177/00345237231200623

Knight, L. (2022). The feminist research-creation pedagogies of BIPOC women’s cultural counter-mapping: Ecological learning through interrelationality, geontology, and cardinal ethics, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2022.2102478

2022. Cover image: Singer, H., Dunn, A., Verlie, B., Lavau, S., & Laird, T. (Eds.) Hacking the Anthropocene: Do-It-Together (DIT). Feral Feminisms, 10(Fall 2021) www.feralfeminisms.com