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   Materiel World is a work that transmutes both information and matter. As demonstrated often, there are certain decisions that cannot be unmade, processes that cannot be undone, and knowledge that cannot be unlearned.

    The project commenced in 2021, as a progression of my ongoing creative practice learning and sharing survival skills, both hard and soft. This trajectory inevitably led me to consider my relationship to firearms.

As an American living in Lutruwita/Tasmania, I offer daily odes of gratitude to disarmament here. I avoid guns, and have never owned a gun. If I was going to learn about guns as tools, I wanted to do so through a framework that was explicitly peaceful. This resolved into the imperfect idea of creating a recycled copper sculpture of a bullet. This inert artwork could undo harm, made with the potential to return stolen, mined materials back into the ground. 

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    Although this proposal is unreasonable and fraught with hypocrisies, it has also been remarkably practical. Step by step, I learned how to make and use every piece of equipment that I was legally allowed to. This required navigating complex and paradoxical systems of knowledge, ethics, and laws that took me to uncomfortable places, requiring me to enter open dialogue with the legal system, heavily armed subcultures, and co-implicated systems of power and dominance that converge around dangerous materials. The title Materiel World borrows a word from the military: materiel, which refers to equipment, munitions, and other inorganic inventory besides personnel. 

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    This exhibit shares the discoveries from this process, set in a working recreation of the indoor pistol range where I received training. I will use this catalogue to transparently document how we learned to make these inert artworks at home, in case reproducing them is ever necessary.

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