My curator’s residency explores the theme of INTERSCAPE with artists whose practice engages with environmentalism. The whole-of-venue multi-sensory installation plays with meanings of between, among, and together in scenes that provide a tour to learn something about our jumbled and irreconcilable positions within our constrained minds – if only like Alice in Wonderland, we look in the right way. As an approach to exploring our environmental crisis, the work also highlights the linkages between the global economy, features of practice in the law and science fields, Indigenous wisdom, and the Earth system, with each embedded in the next.
Garden artist Seb Guy combines Alice’s rabbit hole fall with her shrinking to 10 inches tall, by funneling viewers into the backyard via an ever-narrowing dead tree branch guard of honour corridor made the full length of the house side. The work poignantly sends up our service as custodians of the planet and the life systems it supports. Viewers move awkwardly through the space, hunching down lower and lower until at the end a limbo dance type of bow is needed to dip out under the lowest canopy point. The disorientation lingers as we instantly confront a giant constructed dead forest in the backyard, further skewering senses of scale, perspective, and distance. The triangular tree formation becomes an alternative listening space, violating expectations and extending Seb’s strange and alien world. Walking within and around it in a funerary procession we write dedications to the forest corpse on ‘body bag’ tags and tie them to selected branches.
In the dreamlike underbelly of the house objects morph to evoke the sleeping mind, including Tamsin Edwards-Francis works that use the presentation tools of planning and development to critique the discipline of landscape design in her own creative process. Stripped of bespoke and recognisably flat matte, these commercialised graphic layers point to our overused dealings of economies of scale and standardisation that are ravaging the planet right up to the House Conspiracy front door. The alienating effect of this work is struck at a deeper and more disturbing level in a work by Helle Cook comprising a large amputated tree branch sitting upended and rootless across the room. Disembodied shimmering leaves flicker endlessly around the branch’s shadow on a nearby screen that evokes a range of feelings connected to innocent playful fleeting childhood memories and a type of murder.
Like the way flotsam finds a physical form from the forces around it, Guy’s seaweed debris elongated floorwork traces the shape of the outside passageway work and channels Mother Earth to reinstate living essence alongside the other ghosts in the basement space. The work provides a powerful technological critique as a conversation, by using a pattern language coded form to reverberate the counterpoint logic and subtlety of nature. This dialogue revolves around the observation that we are doing something wrong in the way we design and make things.
Cook’s upstairs room of casually draped painted sheet canvases using makeshift structural frames creates a psychological space that makes it clear it is uncertain we will find a dwelling place of comfortable knowing within our hegemonic Anthropocenic realm. The fragile and tentative connections between isolated wispy linear reactions sit uneasily in their compositions, like the aftermath from turmoil, drained of potency to provide schematic sense or markers on how to navigate. However, from a different view, the gentle repetition and beautiful colour play provides a resting place to contemplate alchemical springboards to alternate ways of thinking. It’s here that one can hope to meet Alice’s White Queen, who in her exploration of human imagination extolls the virtues of thinking about the impossible.
Next door to Cook’s whole-of-room installation, a public indoor listening space complements Guy’s private outdoor listening space that provides a counterpoint in the work’s journey. Melding authoritative institutional frames, rows of chairs set classroom-like face text on a wall whilst the Australian Earth Laws Alliance People’s Tribunal proceedings, held concurrently in the city centre Federal Law Courts, broadcasts live through a speaker. The words blown up on large sheets of paper on the wall state: ‘Obligations, not rights’, originally handwritten on the inside of an envelope by Indigenous academic and Judge at the People’s Tribunal, Mary Graham. The words are an expression of her position on invasionist law in relation to traditional Indigenous lore. Here, like Alice’s experience of Jabberwocky, Graham’s words expose the non-sensical reality of the language and proceedings enshrined in the broadcast. Graham highlights the need for people to understand that formal educative and other socialisation processes must all align to develop global criticality about the importance of enforcing the implementation of language and action for us all to be ‘patterned into the landscape’ 1 as part of a ‘mob’. 2
Arranged as a two-column list of repeated text, Graham’s assertion resembles blackboard punishment writing, a tool used to drum corrective behaviour into recalcitrant children. As adults looking into this experience through this text, like the White Queen’s foresight Alice experienced, Graham’s memory isn’t just working backwards. Graham is identifying actions appropriate for the future so that we can all avoid staying stuck forever in the eternal present. Addressing past-present-future, Graham’s task can be perceived in an enabling way, which could lead us all into a space of meaning and action as a revised possible future.
Mental time travel is also explored in the residency’s sister exhibition that I curated at Brisbane’s Spring Hill Reservoirs, a rabbit hole that goes down into the Earth’s underbelly and opens out into large stone-walled rooms that originally housed the city’s water supply. Ancient megafauna is celebrated in a moving image work by Joseph Burgess that sees a giant puppet bird parading the streets of Alice Springs and also in a large carpet displaying flora and fauna made by Australia’s leading environmental artist Fiona Hall.
Other artists focus on the processes that have devastated the landscape since invasion. Jude Roberts and Helen Hardess present work that was developed as part of a House Conspiracy residency, recreating plankton nests in waxed paper to reveal the deep time histories and hidden relationships of groundwater systems and the life forms they support. They also explore the way that the western world’s resources industries and agriculture impact on eco-systems by using the nested stygofauna drawn from samples of bore water for analysis.
Spoken word poet Caresse Creswell and video artist Di James created ‘Bleach’ as a response to the rapidly deteriorating condition of the Great Barrier Reef and Dale Collier, a Darkinjung/Wiradjuri socio-politically engaged practitioner presents a moving image work exploring finite resources and sustainable practice in relation to invasionist neoliberal governance. Anastasia Tyurina examines the microscopic environment of contaminated water that she animates into large painterly projections and Suzanne Bartos invites visitors to spin each of the “prayer wheels”, made from repurposed oil drums.
My work traces the alienating effects of capitalism in a large tapestry that begins with Indigenous connection in a quote by Graham: ‘I am located therefore I am.’ Successive panels track this increasing alienation through core world events that includes and extends Hannah Arendt’s discussion on this theme.
In conversation with all of the visual art works in this venue, Liquid Architecture’s Danni Zuvela curated performances that took the idea of listening further within many time zones as meditations and microscopic tours, led by Indigenous artist Libby Harwood and several others.
Many thanks to supporting partners Museum of Brisbane, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery Sydney, Liquid Architecture, Brisbane City Council, Queensland College of Art and the Australian Earth Laws Alliance.
1 Indigenous academic Mary Graham describes this understanding as stemming from the Indigenous position: “I am located therefore I am.’ Internatonal Symposium: Exploring our Legal Relationship with the Living World—Caring for Country, Rights of Nature & Legal Personhood, 28 October 2018.
2 Indigenous elder Bob Randall in his book describes that humans have been given the Laws of tjukurrpa to apply kanyini as a principle of connectedness through caring and responsibility to all people, and that people means ‘all of us’ as reflected in the use of the word mob. “Right throughout my life, old men would point to a forest of trees or a grove of trees or just one tree and refer to it as people: ‘See the mob over there.’ This way of talking would be referring to kangaroos, trees, hills or humans. Any of us could be ‘that mob’ or ‘us mob’ could include the totality of that.” Songman: the story of an Aboriginal Elder of Uluru. Editor Paul Newbury (Sydney: ABC Books, 2001) 17.