Bodily poetics…

‘Wearing.Opacities’ is an installation outcome of two years collaborative research and making between Debris Facility and Hen Vaughan, exploring wearable technologies, bio-medical adornment, and concrete poetry for the body

‘We administer images-print-text to the skin, refracting how bodily subjecthoods are materially, socially and medically produced. Materials metabolised include adhesives, cosmetics, casts, capsules, canulas, calluses, DNA, hormones, plastics, and asemic residues found on the body. Our processes of augmentation, mutation and adornment narrate and resist capture. They attune to in/visibilities and il/legibilities resonant with queer/trans and medicalised experiences - spectrums of opacity that shift through amplification, magnification, synthesis; concealment, redaction, noise. Through intradependent working, we conceal and reveal our in/dividual capacities, desires, material processes and bodily poetics. Wearing as an act of covering and protection, as well as degradation and disintegration, are the oscillations and feedback loops which we perform. Adornment is dis/embodied to produce haptics and affects embracing cyborg friction and Body Corporate becoming.’
Debris Facility and Hen Vaughan, 2025

An audio description of this exhibition is available HERE

The artwork ‘Wearing.Opacities (Ad+Verse) (video)’ with audio description can be accessed HERE

About the artists:

The Debris Facility Pty Ltd has been operating for a decayed in Naarm/Melbourne de/producing culture and waste management in the form of a para-corporation. They run “Conduction” as a multi-function art space in Footscray, alongside sessional teaching and other contracts. They have contributed to large scale exhibitions, performances and publications with and beyond institutional spaces. A white settler born in Canberra in 1986 alongside the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, persistently attempting to avoid alienation through cultural frameworks.

Hen Vaughan is a writer and artist based on unceded Kaurna yerta. They are curious about the politics and poetics of in/visible illness, embodied experiences of wearable technology, walking practices, and access as dramaturgy. Hen has produced and collaborated locally and nationally on performances, workshops, walking tours, publications, community radio shows, public programs, audio descriptions and artist camps.

Exhibition dates: 24 July - 16 August, 2025
Opening Celebration: Saturday 26th of July 2-4pm.

Previous Exhibitions