Ebony Wright - Chrysalises

Chrysalises (2025) investigates how systems of language influence the way individuals understand and categorise one another. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s writing on the influence of the printing press, the work reflects on how the organisation of ideas within a book has shaped broader social habits of classification. Chrysalises proposes an alternative mode of reading that resists these structures and encourages a more open understanding of identity.

Chrysalises fragments phrases across a constructed concertina form, breaking apart linear text and prompting a physical, exploratory form of reading. This approach draws from key ideas in Ulises Carrion’s The New Art of Making Books and from Ana Paula Estrada’s I can't see you, both of which foreground materiality, spatial arrangement and the conceptual weight of the substrate as integral components of meaning.

In Chrysalises, material presence and tactile engagement guide the reception of information. The work suggests that deeper insight often emerges through embodied interaction rather than through language alone.

Within the context of this exhibition, Chrysalises responds to Tse’s Portrait of an Australian from the Intersections folio box. The work extends this lineage by challenging linguistic order and reaffirming the role of physical encounter in shaping our understanding of each other.