Tarsh Bates (she/they) is the UmArts Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Design and Molecular Biology at Umeå Institute of Design and the Department of Molecular Biology
I am a non-Indigenous Australian. I was born in Mununjali/Beaudesert, Yugambeh/Queensland, grew up in Matamata, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and have lived for the last 35 years in Boorloo/Perth, Nyungar Boodja/South-Western Australia. I pay my respects to the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar nation and the Sami people of Ubmeje, Sápmi, the lands on which I live and practice, their Elders past, present and emerging and their continuing cultural, spiritual and educational practices.
I have worked as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet-paper packer, a compost researcher, a honeybee ejaculator, a gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, an academic, an editor, a bookkeeper, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. I hold an MSc & PhD in Biological Art from SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia.
I am formed from the exhalation of cyanobacteria and millennia of evolution. My body seethes and pulses with hundreds of other species, fashioned and transfigured by tiny lives and deaths, host to a thriving ecology. We are in relentless re-orientation, sensitive to pH, temperature, moisture and nutrients, tentatively traversing the affordances of each other’s bodies. Our bodies are animated by chemical transmissions and constant reproduction; transfigured by sensation.
In my postdoctoral research, I have been exploring the roles of odorants generated by microbes through their metabolic processes within ecologies, how these can be understood as interspecies communications and how they are affected by environmental and climate changes. Olfaction is a vital and neglected sensory aspect of place-making and interspecies communication. Ephemeral and invisible, smell chemicals are exchanged at all scales, from the molecular to the atmospheric, flowing between microbes, fungi, plants, animals, soil, water and air. Odorants move through and between bodies and species, integral to life processes and multi-species place-making. However, olfactory orientations are increasingly redolent with the pungent stench of colonial and capitalist over-consumption, extraction and terra-firming. Find out more on the Scentsory Foraging website.
Three projects have emerged during this research:
has been developed in collaboration with artist and eco-social worker, Susan Hauri-Downing (AUS). We explore the significance of olfactory landscapes to the rapidly changing, multi-species experiences of place and of environmental change and loss, also known as solastalgia. Through a series of eco-sensory community workshops, performances and artworks, we explore how olfaction can help us understand and manage ecological distress and welcome or imagine novel ecologies. This project has received support from , Western Australia and the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Creative Industries.
The research questions we explore in SoS are:
Scents of Consumption (SoC) traces the agencies of microbial volatile organic chemicals through human and more-than-human consumption practices, traversing scales from the molecular to the atmospheric. The first stage of this project explores the olfactory relationships between lichen, ice, reindeer and anthropogenic climate change. In the long dark winters across Sápmi, reindeer forage through the forests attracted by the smells of lichen buried under layers of snow. However, climate change causes rain and unpredictable snow melts, where melted snow freezes into ice. The volatile chemicals released by the lichen can’t diffuse through the ice and reindeer struggle to find their food. This seemingly small shift in olfactory relations between lichen, reindeer and frozen water has profound effects on multispecies migration, economies and cultures across Sápmi. Consumption is central to these olfactory re-orientations: matter is sensed, ingested, metabolised and emitted. SoC explores how human-induced environmental change affects atmospheric flows, gaseous metabolisms and odorous relations. This project has received support from the , University of Copenhagen.
The research questions I explore in SoC are:
Scents of Asilomar (SoA) is a collaborative creative project with designers (USA) and (CHINA/UK), in which we explore the interactions between biotechnological practices, atmospheres and olfactory experiences. We collect and blend odorants from diverse biotechnological environments and organisms to imagine, synthesise and co-create multi-species scents, spirits and futures. Supported by the at . This project resulted in a performance intervention at “,” Monterey, CA in February 2025.
Other works can be found at: