Matthew Bird / Charity Edwards
Future fossil 2025
steel, paint
$POA
Reimagining Lorne’s coastal history, architect-artist Matthew Bird and architect-geographer Charity Edwards collaborate on the interactive artwork Future Fossil. Rooted in Bass Strait narratives, it merges ancient ecological dominance with modern technological challenges. The sculpture mimics a fossilised megafauna, crafted from weathered mechanical objects emerging from the dramatic shoreline of The Point. The endurance of steel urges tactile engagement and also prompts pondering of more-than-human timelines.
Simultaneously reflecting vanished marine giants and contemporary concerns like undersea drones mapping offshore wind farms, it intertwines historical richness, present urbanisation, and future possibilities. The artwork navigates a perilous oceanic domain, bridging myth, mystery, and industrial nostalgia.
Matthew Bird is a multidisciplinary artist and architect who practices across public art, installation art, moving image, interior design, architecture and site-specific interventions. Bird is the founding director of Studiobird, a creative practice with outcomes the result of a progressive and experimental process foregrounded by a unique collaborative practice model which brings together professionals from the fields of art, architecture, design and science. Cinematographers, composers, urban researchers, astrophysicists, biologists, industrial designers, choreographers share in a ‘what-if’ approach and unite under the manifesto of reimagining ideas, symbols and materials to create interactive multifaceted worlds that offer meaning and complexity.
Matthew holds a Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Architecture from RMIT University and is currently Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Art Design & Architecture, at Monash University. He has exhibited commissioned works at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Festival, MONA, Venice Architecture Biennale (Italy), Liberty Gallery (Brasilia, Brazil), McClelland Gallery, and MPavilion. Public commissions include Lanzarote (2023), Petrosphere (2021), Warracknabeal Courthouse (2022), Parallaxis (2020), and Afterlife (2017).
Charity Edwards is an academic, registered architect, and urban geographer. She has practiced architecture for over 20 years and collaborates with other artists, scientists, and communities to create creative spaces, landscapes, objects, and urban strategy. More recently, her research highlights the impacts of urbanisation in remote environments: investigating how urban processes extend into the ocean through autonomous underwater technologies. Charity is also a co-founder and ongoing member of The Afterlives of Cities research collective, which brings together expertise in creative civic practice, architecture, digital fabrication, astrophysics, and speculative fiction to recover futures in space.
Charity holds a Master of Architecture from RMIT and Master of Environment from the University of Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a PhD and is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Art Design & Architecture, Monash University. Recent publications include Edwards, Charity & Amelia Hine, ‘The Mines of Tomorrow: More-than human operators of deep sea urbanisation’ in Sharing Spaces: Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships edited by Dolly Jørgenson & Finn Arne Jørgenson, Pittsburgh, PA, USA: University of Pittsburgh Press (2024); and Edwards, Charity, ‘Subversive Submersives: The unseen urbanisation of the Southern Ocean’, Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal 33 (2023). Recent group exhibitions include Sediment, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2021); and Beazley International Design of the Year, Design Museum, London (2020).
Images: Parallaxis 2020, film still. (top); Matthew Bird (middle); Charity Edwards (bottom). Courtesy the artists.
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