SHERRY PADDON

Fortune Comes to Those Who Wait is a multimedia project that explores the concept of consumerism through a surreal dinner party scene depicted in photography, video, and sculpture. I am intrigued by materialism and how the media reinforces the notion that excessive consumption and opulent lifestyles are symbols of success and happiness, despite the contrast with our everyday realities. In my work, I employ food, plants, and symbolic objects to represent our aspirations and desires, illuminating the fragility of our dreams and how possession becomes a means of preserving them. The constant stream of media messages promoting consumerism reinforces the societal pressure to accumulate and consume, resulting in a tension between our collective desires and the reality of our daily lives.

By creating dreamlike imagery, I aim to initiate a conversation about the impact of consumerism. The contrast between the lavish platters sprouting new growth and their ultimate demise symbolizes the unsustainable nature of excessive consumption and the dark side of possession. Ultimately, my work seeks to highlight the effects of societal messages of materialism and reflection on our collective desires and their influence on the world. Through the use of a visual language that speaks to our aspirations, I aim to encourage viewers to question their relationship with consumption and possession.

Sherry Paddon Quiambao Fortune comes to those who wait (Ed. 1/2) (detail) 2023

Single channel digital video. Filmed and edited by Apurva Gupta. Archival pigment prints

Sherry Paddon Quiambao is a multi-disciplinary artist of Filipino heritage, born and raised in regional Western Australia. Her work explores the relationship between found objects, memory, cultural heritage, and consumption. Using various mediums such as photography, sculpture, and installation, Paddon challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with possessions and their impact on self-image and status. Her work often touches on themes of identity, belonging, and the complex intersection between culture and consumerism. She completed a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Sculpture, at Curtin University in 2003, followed by postgraduate studies in art curation and secondary education. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, the Philippines, and the United States of America. Through her art, she invites viewers to engage with important issues and consider new perspectives.

Every human identity is ecological. We are nature, the environment is not a mere backdrop for humanity, a discrete object. The way we interpret, interact and react to the natural and cultural elements of our environment have both reaching biological and sociological consequences. This work explores the significant shift in our landscape ecology from early settlement to current day and illustrates how over consumption, displacement and disconnection from our natural environment has contributed to the loss of traditional knowledge of land management and manifested an out of balance ecosystem adversely affecting our cultural landscape. On re-searching my own family heritage and colonial land tenure, I was keen to examine the impact of the introduced individual land ownership laws post settlement, especially in relation to the fabrication of fencing barriers around riparian zones, waterholes, springs etc. Exclusion from natural water resources restricted the movement of Noongar peoples severely inhibiting their ability to carry out centuries old land management practises. With intensive agriculture dominating our natural assets, I considered the saying ‘water is life’. Water is absolute to all human societies, and the flow of ‘living water’ a critical value in the development of land use, regeneration and maintaining a healthy heritage continuity. The simulated dry spring of baked clay reconstructs the importance of a robust riparian landscape for the protection of flora, fauna and environmental values. Its health critically underpins our physical and mental wellbeing. New learning from old is a key component in the regenerative processes going forward. The ‘understanding the past to learn for the future’ is represented here by my interpretations of Noongar William Cox (1908, Katanning shire) and Mitchell Pensini (1998, Geraldton). The re-constructed wattle blossom is a symbol of future fertility emanating from the sharing of cultural knowledge around the landscape.

Born, 1970, Narrogin, Western Australia. Lori is a nationally recognised artist, being shortlisted for over 80 awards and held 26 solo exhibitions. Her art practice is an exploration of self identity and placement within her family’s multifaceted history. It is direct illustration of her response and relationship to her family’s unbroken tenure with the Australian landscape since first settlement. She combines both European and indigenous lineages to her family heritage to express ideas about identity/belonging within her complex history. Combined botanical and figurative genres are prominent and form a distinctive personalised ‘language of flowers’ to aid in expressing one’s inner strengths and transformations. They seek to cultivate positive self and ecological awareness, and to create a narrative around our cultural identity and role within our natural world.

I see one of my own roles as an artist as creating spaces for imagining alternative environmental futures — of creating ‘anticipatory archives’ — not already in existence. I use what I call a strategy of ‘both/and’: acknowledging the role of complicity in social-ecological systems and how each of us struggle to maintain a contingent—yet effective— position as human and ecosystem participant. In February I was given an unassuming tray of about six thousand small photographs of farming properties in southwest Western Australia. Taken from a plane, they are an archive made by humans, for humans. I am the third artist to be custodian (or moral discharger?) of this accidental archive. I scanned in around 1000 photographs and set myself the task of unsettling the eye of settler colonialism with a more ecological vision.

We are water damaged, blurry, eaten, gluedtogether, dog-eared and scratched. We represent a moment in the history of the Wheatbelt — sometime after the 1950s?

But we have lost our negatives and our histories can only be gleaned from occasional comments on our backs.

You are small fragments of experience at the level of the ground in remnant bushland — well below the scale of the aerial view. You are the colour of the soil and the sound of wind in the sheoak.

What happens if an archive is for the future and not just the past? What happens if it speaks forwards as well as backwards — and for the more-than-human? Uncertainty about truth and orientation is at the core of unsettling the present. A thousand portraits of homes from the golden age of the Wheatbelt are partnered with animals on the edge of extinction, paleaorivers and salt lakes, and landscapes of recovery. With its insistent rhythm, this artwork is driven to count the toll, not just of the past, but for what might yet be possible.

Dr Perdita Phillips is an Australian artist working with environmental issues and social change since 1991. Born in Perth/Boorloo she has long concerned herself with interactions between human and nonhuman worlds, working in installation, environmental projects, walking, sound, video, sculpture and publishing. She has exhibited widely including Bird (Climarte) and Underfoot: sTrAtA (Gallery152) in 2023, Energaia (John Curtin Gallery) and Unique States (Holmes à Court gallery at Vasse Felix) in 2022, Make Known: The Exquisite Order of Infinite Variation (2018, UNSW Galleries), Here&Now2018: Besides, it is always the others who die (Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery), Incinerator Art Award (2017, Incinerator Gallery), Another Green World (2017, Western Plains Cultural Centre), Radical Ecologies (PICA, 2016) and Novel Ecologies (2013, The Cross Arts Projects, Sydney). Published books include Fossil III (2019, as part of the Lost Rocks project) and Birdlife (Nandi Chinna, Michael Farrell, Graeme Miles, and Nyanda Smith) with Lethological Press. www.perditaphillips.com

Perdita Phillips wheatbelt anticipatory archive

2023

Looped HD video projection with sound