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Clare Britton, Therese Keogh and Kenzee Patterson work together as the interdisciplinary collective Magnetic Topographies. The name references the way some birds use iron-rich receptors to sense the Earth's magnetic field and build a mental map of magnetic landscapes to aid in navigation. Similarly, the group connects people and practitioners across diverse disciplines, with a focus on cooperative learning and ethical, place-based relationships. Magnetic Topographies work often attends to what is already present, to collectively learn with and about the materials and communities in which we live and work.

For All that is Alive, Magnetic Topographies were invited to produce the exhibition’s publication, a document that typically captures the thematic and object-based information of artist’s works and curatorial thinking for the record. The publication is intentionally unstable: printed and bound by audience members, and individually inscribed using transparent sheets. Rather than documenting the artworks directly, the publication features scans of offcuts, tests, and material ephemera submitted by participating artists—fragments of their developing work. Printed on-site using everyday tools, the publication remains open-ended, experimenting with how knowledge is shared and kept alive.