A Biography of Daphne is an anthology of essays and artist pages that takes the nymph who turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo as a way of thinking through trauma, transformation and the entanglement of bodies, species and environments.
About This Book
Edited by curator Mihnea Mircan and art historian Helen Hughes, the book develops from the exhibition of the same name at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. Its starting point is a classical story of escape that ends in metamorphosis—a body becoming a tree, and then an image. The contributors treat Daphne less as a victim frozen in myth than as a figure for the present: someone caught at the point where figure and ground, self and environment, stop holding apart.
Commissioned texts and visual contributions move between three broad concerns: the integrity and vulnerability of the body; the ways bodies are extended through performance, prosthesis and technology; and alliances that cross species and symbolic orders. The result is a wide-ranging reader on art, ecology and the politics of transformation, published by Spector Books with Melbourne's Discipline and ACCA.
Key Features
- Commissioned essays and artist pages by 23 contributors
- Contributors include Esther Leslie, Michael Marder, Sophie Lewis, Candice Lin, Jonas Staal, Amelia Groom, Eva Hayward and Justin Clemens
- 15 colour and 100 black-and-white illustrations
- Thread-sewn binding, designed by Žiga Testen and Kim Mumm Hansen
- Co-published with Discipline and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
What You'll Discover
- How a classical myth of pursuit and transformation can frame contemporary questions of trauma and survival
- Artistic and theoretical approaches to the body's vulnerability and its performative or prosthetic extensions
- Thinking on symbiosis and interspecies alliance from philosophy, ecology and art
- Daphne as a model for the breakdown between figure and ground in visual, social and ecological life
About the Editors
Mihnea Mircan is a writer and curator of the Plan B Foundation in Cluj, Romania. Helen Hughes is an art historian and senior lecturer in art history, theory and curatorial practice at Monash University in Melbourne, where she is deputy head of Fine Art.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Dimensions: 150 × 220 mm
- Pages: 384
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783959058070
- Publisher: Spector Books
Perfect For: Readers of contemporary art theory, curators and artists working with ecology and the body, and anyone interested in how myth continues to shape thinking about transformation and care.