Lauren Burrow: ‘Foods That Don’t Rhyme’ and ‘Sculpting Air’

See Plumwood committee member Lauren Burrow’s Plumwood-inspired work Foods That Don’t Rhyme at the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength. Or if you missed out - read her contribution ‘Sculpting Air’ to One Vast Library: https://onevastlibrary.com/essays/sculpting-air

Artist Lauren Burrow with her work Foods that don’t rhyme, 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength; photo: Bri Hammond. Courtesy of https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/2026-adelaide-biennial-of-australian-art-yield-strength/lauren-burrow/

In Foods that don’t rhyme, Lauren Burrow plays with this sense of confusion in her crocodile-canoe sculpture. The crocodile’s death roll prompted a hasty rolling movement in the beeswax casting process, while the animal’s colouring and skin texture are evoked by the mottled sea glass found in the shallows of its habitat. On the adjacent wall, one torch light flashes to the beat of a human heart and another to the beat of a crocodile heart, rhythmically falling in and out of synch. The title of this work of art is inspired by the eco-philosopher Val Plumwood, who, having survived a crocodile attack herself, remarked that ‘it has seemed to me that our worldview denies the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth – that we are food and through death we nourish others’.

“Having spent time in Plumwood’s personal library, I’ve gotten to know her as a witty, animated and often harsh writer of critical marginalia. In books and articles that she read, Plumwood would scribble notes with a pen in the blank spaces of the pages that frame, interrupt and support texts. In a sense these spaces are like the air round the words, if we are to think of air as a material strata, often relegated to the ‘background’ due to the nature of its support for the actions of more discrete/less expansive agents (humans, other animals, objects, buildings).”