Mel O'Callaghan's work, The Source, from 2023, will feature in an ambitious new exhibition curated by internationally renowned curator Chus Martínez titled A velvet ant, a flower and a bird at The University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art.
Opening 19 February and running until 6 June 2026, the exhibition brings together works from the University of Melbourne’s Classics, Biology and Art collections, alongside new commissions and performances by acclaimed artists from Australia and abroad.
‘This exhibition can be seen as a garden of knowledge, structured around three familiar figures from nature—a velvet ant, a flower, and a bird. These figures represent a parliament of beings, each carrying symbolic and metaphorical weight that encourage us to reimagine what intelligence means.’
— Chus Martínez, Curator
Historic and contemporary works will be displayed in dialogue, fostering unexpected encounters between the University’s collections and contemporary practice. The exhibition invites visitors to question the divide between natural and artificial intelligence and to see intelligence as something shared across all living systems and materials, rather than an exclusively human trait.
This expansive curatorial vision explores how museum collections can open space for new ways of reasoning. “In approaching the University’s collections outside conventional academic frameworks, I came to the idea of calling animal wisdom into account,” Martínez explains.
“Collections hold many narratives—historical, cultural, economic, material—and by bringing them into living knowledge systems, we’re able to dissolve the binary between the natural and the artificial. The visitor enters a kind of ecosystem, where objects and digital media exist without hierarchy, allowing the imagination to roam widely.”
The first of these entities is the velvet ant, which Martínez describes as “a wise being, a connoisseur of materials and renewable energies,” who represents radical adaptation—inspired by recent scientific studies into its uniquely light-absorbing structure, which could revolutionise solar technology. The flower, regarded as a “sun-fed intelligence,” symbolises perpetual renewal and adaptive creativity. The bird, inspired by Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi’s pioneering flocking studies, embodies “the power of collective intelligence—an emergent awareness that transcends individual cognition.”
‘Chus Martínez’s visionary approach champions arts' capacity to drive social change. Her exhibitions create space for exercising new connections and modes of awareness and encouraging meaningful dialogue across disciplines.’
— Charlotte Day, Director of Art Museums, University of Melbourne
Martínez adds: “At a time when fantasies of domination—technological or otherwise—threaten to upend our sense of equality, we urgently need spaces that train free thought. A relevant society is one where many forms of knowledge flourish, inspiring new languages for thinking and feeling together.”