Publication launch: Sriwhana Spong and Tessa Laird in Conversation

Sriwhana Spong’s practice is grounded in questions of how knowledge is approached, framed and made perceptible. Working across film, sculpture, performance and writing, Spong is often spurred to create new work by a small or contingent encounter—a text, an image, a living organism or a historical trace—which become the starting point for extended inquiry. Such catalysts have included a rat nesting outside her bedroom window, a newly identified species of snake, the writings of a medieval woman mystic, a twelfth-century Javanese poem, and a painting by her grandfather, the Balinese artist I Gusti Made Rundu. Spong follows their traces through experiential, speculative and research-based inquiry, allowing for changing perspectives that are attentive to positionality, relationships and shared forms of understanding. Across these encounters, her practice unfolds in a nonlinear way, reframing understandings of time and human and non-human life.

Tessa Laird is an artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA Art. Originally from Aotearoa, Tessa was an art critic for over 20 years and editor of Monica Reviews Art and LOG Illustrated. More recently she was Editor Online for Art + Australia (2016-2019), editing a special “Multinaturalism” issue of the journal in 2021. Her monographs include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader (Auckland: Clouds, 2013); a cultural history of bats: Bat (Reaktion: London, 2018), and a cinematic foray into animal studies: Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025).