touchsprings is an exhibition by Ōtepoti Dunedin and Canada-based artists Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux. Through their research-based, interdisciplinary, and site-responsive approach, Bellamy and Fauteux consider interdependent relationships within living systems.

The title, touchsprings, is a word the artists have coined to describe moments of action that set irreversible and unintended things into motion. Plants and the stories they hold unite the video artworks, installations, and drawings in the exhibition and provide prompts from which to contemplate ways of seeing and relating.

From the invention of kerosene to plant taxonomy, touchsprings brings together significant bodies of work that illuminate the hidden seeds that set things in motion.

Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux collaborate with diverse contributors on conceptually-rooted and site-responsive projects. They have presented recent solo exhibitions at Hocken Gallery (Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand), MSVU Art Gallery (Kjipuktuk Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), and YYZ Artists Outlet (Tkaronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada). They were the 2024 Frances Hodgkins Fellows at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka the University of Otago (Ōtepoti, Aotearoa). They share their time living within the Sikniktuk district of Mi’kma’ki (Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada) and in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa.

touchsprings includes two works made with Colleen Coco Collins. Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. Her practice oscillates temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, frequencies, the ouroboric, the orogenous, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. She lives littorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.