Portal Into The Multi-Species: Ori Orisun Merhav

Beautiful words by Dan Thawley guide us through the experience:

A primordial obsession reimagined in the present, whispering of future utopias.

This is the vocation of Ori Orisun, an artist whose fascination with the entomological phenomenon of shellac defines her practice. Inherently feminine, secreted by the Lac insect in the forests of South East Asia, her volatile medium glistens with an amber glow - pooling into deep gradients or stretched taut as a glassy skin in planes and fractal constellations of sparkling resin.

With inherent links to the history of craft and furniture-making, the storied past of shellac finds new hope in the artist’s intrinsic dialogue with the natural processes of the animal kingdom. Once applied as protection and insulation as a varnish, sealant, or glaze, today Orisun respects the material’s organic legacy, re-imagining its scale and conscientiously widening the parameters of its inherent behaviours. Tempered by machine - its sculptural proclivities forced into a semblance of uniformity - it rebels, transforming once again into cellular networks at the chemical mercy of temperature and time.

For A Portal Into The Multi-Species, Orisun approaches the corridor as a liminal space, imagining a transitory architecture or passerelle between the differing modalities of her work.

In an opening gesture, delicate clusters of mouth-blown bubbles sprout like creatures on sprigs of steel, forming suspended cocoons frozen on the gallery walls. By mimicking the insect itself formed with its own byproduct, they exist somewhere between the animal and the botanical: representing the building blocks of her research grounded in the artisanal processes of hand manipulation and the tools of sugar and glass-blowing.

Beyond, the scale shifts as the artist imagines shellac in conversation with other natural fibres. Fiery globes of shellacked palm sheaths (each a rigid carapace) rest in steel claws to form a canopy of orb-like lamps: LEDs illuminate the structure from inside to reveal the exoskeletal qualities of the woven fibres trapped within it.

On the ground floor below, the video artwork METAXÝ conceived with Studio Mimesis proposes a self portrait of the artist as insect. In an interspecific conversation with the Lac insect, Orisun appears adorned by her shellac creations forming an architectural halo that seems to defy gravity, as digital expressions of shellac dematerialise around her. Anthropological and allegorical in its approach, the work comments on material relationships as disguise and adornment, evoking the human capacity to transform our environments and in turn our selves.

In a monolithic fusion of technology and happenstance, a lone vessel from the Morpho series demonstrates the unique and constantly evolving process of 3D extrusion printing defined by the artist. Trapped between order and chaos, the womb-like vase seems both prehistoric and alien, its 360° honeycomb of shellac forming an imperfect amphora erupting with dripping grids of resin. Part record, part mirage, it’s a printed metaphor for shelter and resistance - a living, growing organism wounded and healed ad infinitum. 

Words by Dan Thawley