Join the artists at ONCA Gallery from 4 – 7pm on Thursday 9 June for the launch of ‘To Mar or Enroot: Choosing the Path for Seeding the Pluriverse’ by Mary Martin & Paccha Turner Chuji.

This diverse mixed media exhibition explores various potential impending byproducts of the Anthropocene, and many which have already been imposed onto our hurting world. It takes as a baseline the war that capitalism has waged over the past centuries against the world’s majorities – both human and non-human. Its aims are twofold. First, it seeks to provoke critical views on how the system’s recklessness and anthropocentric arrogance have disfigured the harmony and pluriversal* nature of Mother Earth. Second, it seeks to support the healing of the Pluriverse by imagining alternative paths and giving creative voices to those who have had to metamorphose to survive our rapidly changing and disrupted worlds, both internal and external.

*The Pluriverse, as the Zapatistas describe it, is a world where many worlds fit, which include the totality of the physical, spiritual and liminal dimensions of life. 

Read more about the exhibition and artists here.

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Image credit: artwork by Mary Martin & Paccha Turner Chuji

Image description: a composite image of Mary Martin & Paccha Turner Chuji’s artwork. On the left a painting by Mary Martin portrays an orange dried stingray floating against a colourful mountainous landscape, typical to the artist’s common subject matter of marine creatures. The mountains are various shades of blue, from deep dark to very pale, that blend into the bright clear sky. Dark, warm shrubbery emerges from the bottom left hand corner. The second part of the composite image on the right is a painting by Paccha Turner Chuji, depicting a colourful harmonious scene representing  blended worlds, both good and bad – intertwining organically. This painting is a spiritual and expressive piece, seen through the artist’s colour choice and mark making. Marine inspired blues flow throughout the image with illustrative lines and marks while bursts of warm yellows, purples, deep oranges, maroon and pale green appear throughout the painting, both juxtaposing and complementing each other. A small blue side profile of a face is seen, peeking out from the flowing colours. The artist describes this as an exploration of how the subconscious expresses itself through the artistic process, and this is seen throughout this liminal, spiritual painting.