Proposals for Reimagined Futures

Jonathan Luckhurst integrates natural processes and ecological systems into immersive artworks that reframe our relationship to the built environment and the natural world.

His works are conceived as deep time echoes — incorporating ancient life forms and ecologies that have appeared throughout Earth’s history in response to moments of distress, to highlight and understand our current moment of crisis. Through them, his works become conceptual biomimicry, re-enactments of ecological strategies, mirroring rhythms of decay and proliferation, alluding to how both we and the Earth might respond.

Volume 1
Mycelium/Void

Fungi have played recurrent, pivotal and transformative roles across Earth’s history, appearing at every major evolutionary threshold. When ecosystems reorganize after fires, volcanic eruptions, floods and glacial retreats, fungi are among the first colonizers, building the soil that successive organisms depend on.

Today, as Earth moves through another evolutionary threshold, how can we collaborate with fungi to create resilient and biodiverse futures? Just as fungal networks have always metabolized waste and redistributed nutrients to sustain what comes after, can we ourselves use these networks to create structures that grow and decompose — providing nourishment to soils and encouraging new life to take form?

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Volume 2
Tetrahedral Lens

In Tetrahedral Lens, a liana is placed at the base of a geometric form. The form is at once grounded and refractive, stable yet reactive, while the interior acts as a trellis, allowing for the proliferation of the plant through time.

Within the context of the current ecological crisis, Tetrahedral Lens is conceptual biomimicry, a re-enactment of a botanical strategy in response to fracture — mirroring ancient ecological rhythms of decay and proliferation while evoking future possibilities through its crystalline surfaces and kaleidoscopic forms.

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Volume 3
Shifting Origins

In Shifting Origins, participants are presented with no clear way through. The work asks us to be more than passive observers and to take part in its evolution through time by amending the soil, nurturing a seedling and harvesting food. Through this engagement, Shifting Origins creates something greater than the sum of its components. Rather than building over the land, the work builds with the land — an immersion that nurtures all senses, creating a foundation for awareness that can be carried forward beyond the confines of the work.

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Volume 4
Blue Carbon

From limestone formed during the Archean Eon to the concrete-infused megacities of the modern era, Blue Carbon traces a journey spanning 2.7 billion years, inviting visitors to contemplate how Earth stores memory — in rock and in living organisms — and how the interplay between biology, geology and humanity will have profound effects on the future of our civilization.

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Volume 5
Otherground

Otherground is biomimicry, a deep time echo of pioneer species responding to ecological distress. Speaking at once to the adaptive capabilities of organisms and the ingenuity of human technologies that nurture life, Otherground reflects on the Symbiocene and on renewed relationships between human and non-human life forms.

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Volume 6
Otherground II

Otherground II is a connector — a living archive, holding memories of preservation, disturbance and renewal — offering a space for reflection, alluding to unknown future outcomes both destructive and healing.

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Financial support provided by the Vancouver Biennale, the Edmonton Arts Council and the Buschlen Mowatt Nichol Foundation.