Rodrigo Arteaga

Rodrigo is a Chilean artist who completed a MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. His practice is concerned with the complex relationship between nature, culture and representation. His interest in working across different areas of thought has led him to collaborate with specialists in fields such as Microbiology, Bio-Fabrication, Mycology, Natural History, Botany, and Architecture. His work often deals with the complexities between human and non-human relations, unearthing the coded enigmas of our relationship with the environment. Rodrigo completed a residency at the Centre for Print Research in September 2022. He worked in collaboration with researchers to use mycelium to produce non-human drawings, photographic images and sculptures to make visible what normally happens beneath the ground. The dark room was turned into a mushroom growing laboratory that became a constellation between the studio and the forest, taking fungi samples from the local surrounding forest to grow in the lab and making experiments that are understood as devices, to observe what would normally be beyond our senses. Thin glass vitrines, microscopes, biotrays and petri dishes were all used to contemplate mycelial growth. Some prints were made using etching to copy mycelium networks, some by directly exposing mycelium onto photosensitive plates, some by writing fungal poems with inoculated letters onto soil. The resulting edition, titled Mycelium Book, features multiple prints and printmaking processes contained in a linen bound box. Mycelium is a process, a behaviour, and in a similar way the ideas in the book grew and expanded. Rodrigo was working in Leigh Woods, Bristol, prior to his residency and his work featured in the Arnolfini’s Forest: Wake this Ground 2022 exhibition. Rodrigo was a keynote speaker at IMPACT 12 Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference September 2022.