Beyond this, a series of silicon casts hang from tall metal legs: strange deities which oscillate between the organic and the artificial. Obsidian stones and opals emerge quietly from behind flaps of soft pinks and purples. These are relics from sites in New Zealand, tying the works to specific geographies and geologies.

Elsewhere, flexible body moulds are delicately flecked with dried flowers. The chosen species were introduced into New Zealand’s delicately balanced ecosystems by Western settlers. The silicon ‘skins’ embedded with petals suggest the indelible impact of colonial interventions on landscapes and bodies, while simultaneously hinting at the possibility of alternative symbiotic modes of existence. This ambiguity of interpretation lies at the heart of the exhibition, which evokes acts of both hope and mourning, ancestral communion and future possibilities.

‘Andesite’ is situated at a fluctuating and uncertain junction between past, present and future, between true histories and imagined mythologies. Characters, both intimately familiar and uncannily distant, inhabit a world squeezed on all sides by ecological disaster – perhaps they are recovering from an environmental disaster, or perhaps they are just on the brink of it.

Austin’s botanical, bodily and technological objects forcefully transport the viewer into a hybrid world. Threads of research, history and fantasy coalesce to produce a rich tapestry which rewards extended looking and provokes new directions of thought.