Connective Energies: Reflections from Terra Culture, Metro Arts
- Niamh Wood
- Nov 12
- 4 min read
Tucked away in the heart of West End, artist Bianca Tainsh’s exhibit Terra Culture is a thriving haven containing entire worlds. Metro Arts’ Gallery One houses three flourishing terra-biomes that, at first glance, I mistook as a collection of native plants. In reality, Terra Culture contains complex, symbiotic ecosystems in which flora and microfauna coexist and collaborate through intricate underground fungal networks. The exhibit’s human visitors are not just observers of these ecosystems, but participants.
Terra Culture is a calm, immersive space. In between twigs and leaves, delicate webs are spun by unseen spiders who’ve made this place their home. Among the fungal network are roots, soil, and tiny creatures who have settled in. The symbiosis within Terra Culture is self-sustaining. It is a living, growing, evolving ecosystem. I lay my palm upon the soil. I close my eyes. My hand interacts with fungi, soil and arachnids whether I choose to acknowledge it or not. Beside me, the screen display shifts to mirror the changes in fungal activity within the soil—a reaction to my touch.
I had the pleasure of speaking with artist Bianca Tainsh within the Terra Culture exhibit. In 2020, Tainsh experienced drought and isolation at her family’s nature refuge on Lake Weyba in Kabi Kabi Country. As the drought broke and the environment embraced change, unprecedented fungi populations bloomed. It was these fungi that provided the spores to build the underground networks fundamental to the terra-biomes of Terra Culture. Lake Weyba, just north of Brisbane, is the literal and spiritual origin place of the exhibition.
Terra Culture evokes deep connectivity and profound, inherent collaboration and coexistence in all things. This connectivity contradicts the anthropocentric assumption that humans exist as observers of ecosystems, rather than participants within them. Terra Culture’s reminder that humans and the more-than-human world are intrinsically connected and relational is not only timely, but imperative. The perceived hierarchy in which humanity is perched atop all else, distinct and special, is not only false but extremely problematic. Faced with climate crisis, unsustainable resource extraction, and mass habitat loss, it is more important than ever for people to challenge their anthropocentric biases and assumptions.
The longer I sat within the space and coexisted with the terra-biomes, the more I became a part of the ecosystem. With each exhale, sound and movement, I contributed in some unique way to the network. In return, I was sustained by the air that I breathed in. In just a short time, I became a part of the connective energies of the Terra Culture ecosystem.
Even the music in the space is part of this reciprocal connectivity. The soundtrack of Terra Culture was composed by Kabi Kabi-based artist Finley Wegener, and exists in collaboration with the biomes themselves. Wegener’s soundtrack is a musical interpretation of the real tones and rhythms—or non-rhythms—of the terra-biomes based on data collected by Tainsh’s hydrophones buried within the soil itself. The sounds of Terra Culture are, to borrow Tainsh’s own words, ‘sonically nourishing’.
For me, Terra Culture not only explores ecocentric perspectives, in which people and more-than-human beings are equal participants within their shared ecosystem, but it serves as a poignant reminder that we are complexly connected to our own human communities. In our increasingly individualistic times, people are searching for a feeling of belonging. Loneliness reigns supreme as we lose sight both of our mythic village, and our understanding of how to exist as a collaborative villager. Faced with fear, uncertainty, and disillusionment in our unprecedented times, we are increasingly disconnected from our ecosystems, both human and more-than-human. Unsure of how to wade through our daily uncertainties, the disinformation, the fear of it all, we shrink toward an increasingly individualistic, insular existence.
Terra Culture is proof that these connective tissues are all around us, even if we are unaware of them. Where dominant Western, anthropocentric thought suggests that humans must somehow ‘save the environment’, Terra Culture serves as a gentle reminder that humans are part of the natural environment: villagers within a diverse, symbiotic village.
Terra Culture highlights the caregiving, resource sharing, and mutual relationality that is profoundly essential to community. These terra-biomes, despite being made up of thousands or millions of organisms and microorganisms, function as one: a diverse, single ecosystem. Similarly, we humans are made up of thousands or millions of tiny pieces, that work together to sustain us as a singular being. Further, our communities are made up of thousands, millions, and billions of people each needing care, resources, and community.
Leaving Terra Culture and returning to the West Village precinct, I found the city not void of this connective energy, but brimming with it. In the gardens, I sat upon a rock and watched children play in the leaf litter. Someone was studying, someone else speaking to their mum. A delivery driver took a break, a man clipped his fingernails, a parent checked in on their baby. Overhead, a Jacaranda tree rained purple flowers down upon us all. Unobserved, tiny creatures moved above, below, all around. A complex underground network laid unseen but active. In the garden, the bird noise was constant. So too was the chatter of the surrounding cafes, the clinks of cutlery, the grind and steam of coffee machines.
The terra-biomes of Terra Culture offer advice to the neighbouring people of West End, in Brisbane, and beyond. Their perfectly harmonious reciprocity and relationality is an example of a functional village in which every tiny participant understands the care, resource sharing, and compromise required to be a villager. In the midst of climate and economic crises, a loneliness epidemic, rising hate and prejudice, and lavish excess for some while others are left to starve, humans have so much to gain from embracing the connectivity and care of the more-than-human world. It is imperative for humans and our systems to reckon with the fact that we are not observers of these ecosystems, but participants within them.
Visit Terra Culture now in Window Gallery and Gallery One at Metro Arts, West End. Exhibition open until November 15th, 2025.
Niamh Wood is a writer and researcher based in Meanjin Brisbane. Niamh's work is published with Island (upcoming), Baby Teeth, Voiceworks, and others. In 2024, Niamh was writer in residence at BRAZZA artist residency in France. She is a creative writing PhD student at the University of New England, Australia. Find Niamh on Instagram @niamhwood12
