BAP is currently collaborating on a site-specific sculpture by artist Mat Chivers, to be installed at the Brotchie farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. The work, entitled Genius Loci, considers the enigmatic beauty that arises out of biological complexity and the recurrence of particular forms across nature despite serving a myriad of different biological functions.

Here’s a video of Chivers discussing his 2019 exhibition Migrations, presented at the Musée d’art de Joliette, Quebec.

Chivers was born in Bristol, UK in 1973 and studied sculpture at Nottingham Trent University, UK and Escuela de Belles Arte, Barcelona, from 1993-96. An extended period of travel followed, where he trained in sustainable farming and building practices in Europe and North Africa, culminating in a solo journey overland to India where he spent time living in the Himalayas. He returned to the UK in 1999 and established a studio in the southwest of England. He lives and works between Devon, UK and Québec.

Chivers’ work looks at some of the relationships between human and more-than-human consciousness, ecology, and evolutionary processes by bringing traditional handmade approaches to art making into counterpoint with cutting-edge technologies. Collaborations with researchers in the fields of science, academia, and culture are at the core of his practice, brought together by a shared desire to make the connections between the unseen and seen

Through his focus on environmental processes and phenomena, other species, and the extreme scales of geological and evolutionary time, Chivers looks at the metamorphic impact of emergent technologies on both our own evolution, and as a consequence, the global ecosystem of which we’re a part. The sculpture, drawing, film, and performance that results from these dialogues are a personal and instinctive reflection on the entanglement of our own nature with the wider ecologies that constitute life on Earth.