Volume 3

Shay Salehi
Sarah Davidson
Emily Chudnovsky

Volume 3: mud puddling, brings together the artistic practices of Shay Salehi, Sarah Davidson, and Emily Chudnovsky. Each artist offers personal insight on creative, material, and community based research, and various strategies for building resiliency for creative work, touching on complexities of human and non-human relationships. A combination of daily practices and personal approaches to finding creative nutrients in dry times brings hope where the competitive narrative of hustle culture has brought exhaustion.

Created instead is a space where the natural world is key to sustainable practice, and where meaningfully engaged community connections and self-regulation are survival skills. Each artist attends to cultural narratives that accompany ecologically informed creative work, embracing reflective and nurturing approaches. The term “mud puddling” in reference to Salehi’s collaborative kinetic sculpture installation Human in the Loop (2023), brings interesting critique to technological participants in our shared ecosystems, grounding these practices in uniquely adapted resource sharing.

Shay Salehi (she/her) explores the complexities of human-nonhuman relationships through her interdisciplinary practice. Her work critiques the frameworks that perpetuate human superiority and the commodification of non-human bodies. Using visual metaphors, Shay invites audiences to contemplate themes of dominance, domestication, and ethical standards. Her background in glasswork, sculpture, and installation enables her to create compelling pieces that question and dismantle normative structures.

Sarah Davidson (they/them) navigates the realms of drawing and painting, creating compositions where shadowy, biomorphic figures and delicate, foliated fragments intermingle. Their work examines the intersections of bodies, environments, and the tangled connections that bind them, all through a queer ecological lens. By dissolving the boundaries between self and other, Sarah's art invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of nature and identity, encouraging a deeper, more fluid understanding of the natural world.

Emily Chudnovsky (she/her) collects organic remnants and synthetic decay to craft sculpture-based installations that reveal human connections to toxic ecologies. Her practice underscores the cyclical nature of non-biodegradables, the intermingling of fiber and function. Chudnovsky’s meticulous process brings attention to overlooked aspects of our daily material use, our environmentally entangled lifestyles, and the need to foster greater appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things.

A selection of butterflies from different families engaging in ‘marine puddling’. Marine puddling was observed from members of all butterfly families found on Sulawesi except Riodinidae (representatives of Hesperiidae not pictured). (A-J) Papilionidae, in order of inset letters: Papilio gigon gigon, P. demoleus demoleus, P. sataspes sataspes, P. fuscus minor, Graphium rhesus rhesus, G. milon milon, G. eurypylus pamphylus, G. meyeri meyeri, G. codrus celebensis, and G. agamemnon comodus; (K-N) Pieridae: Catopsilia pomona flava, Cepora celebensis celebensis, Hebomoia glaucippe celebensis, Appias zarinda zarinda; (O-R) Nymphalidae: Vindula dejone celebensis, Cyrestis thyonneus celebensis, Doleschallia polibete celebensis, Euploea eupator eupator (S-T) Lycaenidae: Anthene lycaenina, Catochrysops ancyra subfestivus.

Photographs by Yi-Kai Tea, Jonathan Soong Wei, and Cheong Weei Gan.