Future farming: The Mars Project IA N TU L LY 18 May – 18 August 2019
Resplendent optimism and hocus pocus Claire Anna Watson Reality stings. The climate is changing irrevocably and ecological disasters are commonplace. Fish are dying in the Murray-Darling and the earth is irrefutably burning.1 This new reality can feed into either a state of despair and inaction or a search for solutions. What are our chances for survival? There are options for humanity. Ian Tully knows this. He is open, curious, resourceful. His creative investigations are beset with alluring idiosyncrasies, peculiar and curious; at their heart is the precarity and preciousness of human life and our relationship to the land. For Ian, caring for the land is an act of citizenship. He holds a great affinity with the land, along with its enormous value to community—beyond monetary—and its ability to enrich life through its bounty. In his new body of work Future Farming: The Mars Project, the artist’s seemingly irreverent responses to the environmental crisis are the product of years of reflection and an abiding respect for the land. Ian has created a personal symbology of ceremony, discovery and pilgrimage. His sculptural works and performative enactments documented in video and photography, connect to ideas of communication and overcoming isolation in the Australian rural landscape. He achieves this with wry humour and an earnest perseverance. For decades, the idea that humans might one day colonise Mars seemed like an unrealistic pipe dream. But in recent years, with the advent of eccentric media-hungry billionaires, the concept has grown with increasing voracity. The space race and its associated conglomeration of potential aliens and spaceships that might inhabit Mars, seems a far cry from the realities of Earth and issues surrounding climate change, yet there is a similar narrative to consider. Within this hunger to stake claim in space, are questions surrounding our own humanity and understanding of future sustainability. We must ask: how might we better care for planet Earth and its natural environment? And, what will be 1 Lindsay Wright. ABC News. Why has the ground started burning on an outback cattle station? www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019-02-13/why-isthe-ground-burning-on-an-outback-nt-cattle-station/10802676 13 February 2019. Retrieved 25 March 2019.
different in our approach should we be entrusted with the responsibility of caring for Mars? Will there be a similar plundering of resources? These questions lie central to Ian’s new body of work. Despite his futuristic mindset, the roots of these artworks can be found in the annals of Ian’s familial history. It was Spring 1948, when Keith Robson Tully conducted a personal ceremony which his grandson Ian Tully would later recall as ‘christening the first fence post on Nalakram’.2 Nalakram was the name of Ian’s family farm, some 750 acres in the South-West region of New South Wales. Documented through black and white photography, Keith releases a canvas water bag on a fence post. In an unorthodox ceremonious gesture, he upturns his hat. Balanced carefully on his head, the inversion creates a potential vessel perhaps to reflect a desire for the earth’s abundance and rain. For a farmer though, this humorous act, appears incredibly creative and beyond the usual expectations of someone working the land. This event would later be the lynchpin of an ongoing body of work by Ian. In his new video work First Post on Mars 2019, Ian embarks on a gruelling yet resplendent journey to lay down a wooden fence post in the desolate landscape. And just as his grandfather dressed his fence-post in water, so too does Ian. This simple act raises broader questions about what it means to mark the land, farming methods, land ownership, as well as traditional custodianship. Adorned in an upturned hat of sorts, Ian wears a colander—suggestive of a vessel and yet unable to hold water—a likely reference to the changing climate. Where strange activism and ritual imbues First Post on Mars, there is a more humorous undertone in the video Objective 1 2019. Through a probing conversation with an unseen commentator, Ian declares: ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Mars’. The artist ruminates on the ‘hocus pocus’ of water divining and its lack of scientific rigour. Yet the bizarre water divining apparatus visible during this exchange could be critiqued similarly. Is this the artist poking fun at himself and therefore in turn, the art world? Within these futile acts and open-ended dialogues, we realise that the survival of humankind, whether on Mars or Earth, will likely be fuelled by the determination of the indefatigable farmer. And this one, we know is ‘always optimistic’ . Claire Anna Watson is an independent curator, arts writer and artist based in Melbourne. 2 The artist in conversation with the author: 31 January 2019.
Ian Tully, Farnley (detail) 2017. Photo courtesy the artist and Olivia Tully-Watts. Cover image: Ian Tully, The Diviner 2018. Photo courtesy the artist.
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