This work explores emergence resulting from using plant growth algorithms to create woven artworks. Within our ecosystem that includes nature and human technology, I explore, through weaving, questions of how to understand complex natural systems, how human technology creates the ‘artificial’ and how we might understand our connections to these through hybridized art forms. I use computer processing and weaving to explore this concept, bridging millennia-old with contemporary technologies while drawing analogies between complex cloth and complex plant systems. This emergence is grown from light, material, structure, coding, plants, and hundreds of thousands of woven binding points unified in a life-like, unanticipated whole.

The two bodies of work produced are ‘Canopy’, a handwoven multi-layered fibre optic installation, and ‘Branching’, a handwoven multi-layered reflective thread installation.

With grateful thanks to The ANU Research School of Physics, particularly Associate Professor Matthew Sellars and Mr Craig MacLeod for their generous assistance and collaboration with ‘Canopy’ artwork.