The Adjacent Possible
Print Council of Australia Gallery
October 14 - 30 2025
Biologist Stuart Kauffman coined the phrase “the adjacent possible” to express his concept of the agentic power of molecular structures that “forever push their way into novelty”. Kauffman argued:
Biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so, they “increase the diversity of what can happen next,” and thus, they may “maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible”…. this means, “diversity begets more diversity”. (Bjornebom 2023:18)
The prints in this exhibition play with this continuous push into novelty through setting up a simple structure of repetition and variation. I have created three key photogravure plates each printed across a repeated series of 24 colour images to create 72 possible variations. Sitting together these images each multiple, form an ecology or a meshwork; here hybridity and emergence are both subject matter as well as formal devices.
The photogravure key plates are composed of photographic imagery of foliage abstracted through painted layers, these are matched with close-cropped macro photography of urban gardens for the underpinning colour prints. The images are at once the product of daily walks, the experience of seasonal change – the everyday – as well as the imagined possible of what eco-philosopher Timothy Morton (2016) has called the ‘strange strangeness’ of perception in the age of the Anthropocene. Any gifted sense of our shimmering world and its possibles is now complicated by the reality of a permanent alteration in the biosphere. This new ‘dark ecology,’ to use another of Morton’s phrases, brings wonder with grief.
So, these images emerge at the intersection of the beautiful and the monstrous, the micro and the macro, the singular and the multiple. They are the products of equal parts chance and design. They hint at multiple realities and the vibrant adjacent more that underpins the everyday.
