Barbara Doran Art
SuperOrganism
Superorganism
Superorganism marks both a pause and a shift in the way I approached art making. After many years of producing a body of work each year, I encountered artists working through slow, durational practices. Their work was less concerned with producing documented outputs and more focused on the qualities embedded in lived experience. Artists such as Marina Abramović, Tino Sehgal and Tehching Hsieh deeply influenced this shift. Their practices foreground attention, endurance, presence and direct encounter rather than object-based production.
Most of the artworks on this website were developed through my PhD, which combined practical and theoretical explorations of a lifelong inquiry into living as a sensitive inhabitant of the earth — what might otherwise be described as the art of living. After completing my PhD, alongside a desire to slow the pace of my art making, I found myself longing for a more liberated space beyond institutional rhythms, where deeper connections with the living world could unfold.
This longing was unexpectedly realised when my family gifted me a beehive. Installed on a quiet bush block outside Sydney beneath an expansive night sky, the hive became both studio and classroom, with the bees as my teachers. Through working with them I began attuning more closely to the rhythms of place: flowering cycles of native plants, shifting weather, and the movement of birds, insects and seasons. Through honey I encountered terroir in a new way — each harvest carrying the subtle signatures of landscape and time.
Living with the hive opened a different perceptual field. The colony revealed itself as a living superorganism — an intricate ecology of relationships where no single body acts alone. Over time, the bees became ecological guides, mythic companions and catalysts for a shift in perception. They drew my attention to the sensory richness through which life continually organises itself. Across a period of almost ten years I simplified how I worked. The process was healing, transformative and expansive. I began exploring patterns, scale and collective practices, eventually forming a performance group with others interested in bees, pollination and connection to nature. This work developed into the Superorganism Collective.
The works shown here include fragments from that period: small observational works, moments spent with bees, and the culminating series Listening to Nature, where my ongoing interest in scale, material encounter and the subtle dance between micro and macro systems comes into focus.
As in much of my work, there is also a mythic layer. Humans are myth-makers, and for me myth-making is one of our great creative capacities — a space where culture, imagination and ecological awareness continuously reshape one another.
Underlying many of these explorations is a framework I describe as EME – Embodied Matter Exploration. This term holds my approach to transdisciplinary, practice-led inquiry where body, matter and environment co-create meaning. Through EME, artistic practice becomes a way of working with sensation, attention and material encounter. It centres presence, rhythm and relational awareness, drawing on phenomenological and ecological ways of knowing. Across different works and media — photography, installation, performance and collaborative practice — EME invites attentiveness to the subtle and often unseen dimensions of experience. It encourages a form of inquiry where intuition, material processes and ecological relationships are understood as entangled participants in the making of meaning.