CARBON NEUTRAL
G.W. BOT
JON CAMPBELL
THE RIVER YARNERS
ANDREW STYAN
LOUISA WATERS
MARZENA WASIKOWSKA
ANNE ZAHALKA
CURATED BY ALEXANDER BOYNES
Ever since humans began to express the world around them in creative languages, the arts have been an instrumental means of addressing the most challenging issues of our times and acted as a form of soft diplomacy for difficult ideas and opinions. War, human tragedy and political upheavals have played out on a 24-hour news cycle since digital technology connected the global village in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, yet these issues remain regionally relevant. It was once said the only collective experiences that all humans would share are birth and death (the taxes bit was a bust), yet the last fifty years have proven there is nothing more urgent, divided and politicised as Climate Change. It will affect us all.
Through their practices artists have the capacity to provoke meaningful dialogue around the existential threats of fire, drought, flood and ecocide due to human-induced Climate Change. For those who are aware of my curatorial and artistic practices, the subject matter of Carbon Neutral will come as no surprise, and nor should it: I make no secret that I am deeply concerned about the Anthropocene. We live in an epoch where human activity is having a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems, and I believe the arts play a key role in alerting, educating and empowering people to make change for the better. In the past decade we have seen a groundswell of concern in the arts for the environment, most notably in the visual arts through the Climarte festival in Victoria. While previous iterations of exhibitions responding to the Climate Crisis flew under that festival’s banner, Carbon Neutral is Canberra Contemporary Art Space’s (CCAS) contribution to Aquifer, a territory-wide program of events and exhibitions spearheaded by Belco Arts, and coinciding with the ANU Climate Update 2022.
When I first conceived the exhibition Carbon Neutral, I ultimately aimed to pose one question: how does an artist produce work to inspire hope and optimism to face the biggest challenge in our lifetimes, without leaving a carbon footprint? I ambitiously proposed that artists would have to offset the carbon emissions produced in their studio practices to create artworks that were carbon neutral. For example, G.W. Bot could plant 100 trees to counteract the use of steel in her work. Marzena Wasikowska could use a solar powered camera, computer, and printer, and deliver her works by bicycle. This all seemed like a fantastic utopian idea until COVID-19 hit, and then life got very difficult for artists, let alone those trying to make art about the Climate Crisis. Just making it out from under the metaphorical doona to produce art during a global pandemic was tough enough in itself, so in order for the urgency of the conversation to carry on, the conceptual limitations of the project had to be modified – the carbon offset would be put on hold.
Image ANDREW STYAN Life Support System, 2016 Mixed media, dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
As one approaches CCAS from the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin a giant inflatable sphere beckons from within the front window, a pair of stylised metallic lungs attempting to breathe from inside the translucent form. What at first glance may look like a reference to the Pop sensibilities of Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog is in fact Life Support System (2016), a visual metaphor of the global systems that support life on earth. The work, a computer-controlled kinetic soft sculpture, is produced by Newcastle based artist Andrew Styan and uses inflatable vessels to represent a threedimensional Venn diagram.
It has been suggested that the ultimate sustainability of all life on earth is determined by three interconnected systems: humans, the environment, and the economy – also referred to as the people, planet, profit concept. Life Support System attempts to show the relationship between these systems. Counter to the traditional view that economic systems serve human systems, Styan believes there is increasing evidence the two have become separate, as the global economy’s guiding principles appear to have little to do with human or social needs.
Coming to the art world as a mature age student, Styan brings with him decades of engineering experience from the steel manufacturing industry that he applies to his practice. In Life Support System he uses air (a proxy for the Earth’s atmosphere) to convey the control the world’s financial systems have over the natural environment. Leading from the inflatable “lifeform” are a series of cables that connect to a computer and a control panel, not unlike a patient in an emergency room. It is at this point that the audience is invited to investigate the welfare of the artwork through a livestream of data on the computer and encouraged to interact with the work to restore the balance of health to the environment.
The true beauty of Life Support System lies in the way the work forces both sides of the brain to fire in tandem –operating as a striking kinetic sculpture within the oeuvre of 20th Century Pop inflatables, but also as a functioning scientific model driven by live data from the stock exchange. It is rare for an artwork to function as spectacle and educational tool simultaneously, however Styan does so with such grace that we cannot help but feel compassion for this lifeform and its health.
The River Yarners are a group of women from Wiradjuri Country / Central West NSW, who came together at the end of 2015 to use craftivism to protest a proposal to siphon water from the Wambuul / Macquarie River in Bathurst for a gold mine in the Blayney Shire. The group has a core of seven members - Wendy Alexander, Ana Freeman, Stephanie Luke, Sally Neaves, Margaret Sewell, Tracey Sorensen and Vianne Tourle, who have created The Yarned River (2015 - ), a truly unique artwork spanning an ever growing 130 metres of crocheting, knitting, weaving, and yarn-crafting that represents the waterway and its tributaries that are essential to the life of the region.
Image THE RIVER YARNERS Yarned River (detail), 2015 – ongoing Recycled knitted and crocheted wool and acrylic yarn, dimensions variable
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image Carbon Neutral installation, 2022
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image JON CAMPBELL No Planet B, 2021
Produced by Bronwyn Johnson, designed and printed by Aaron Beehre Risograph prints on paper, 41 x 30cm each
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
When entering the gallery, the visually sumptuous nature of The Yarned River draws visitors into a soft space full of tactile allure. Throughout its short lifetime the work has been presented in vastly differing locations including on the sidewalk outside government buildings, suburban parks, environmental festivals and the white cube of the gallery. In this current iteration, woollen ‘waterways’ and ‘tributaries’ meander down the gallery walls and over the hardwood floor, gently conveying a heartfelt tenderness that a community feels for their environment.
One of the major strengths of the work is that it can function as community action, a call to arms, and protest art. Each time the work is presented it takes on unique forms and configurations, one day allowing it to be thrust into the faces of the government in the street, the next slowly pondered in the gallery. It is in this forum that the gentle art of yarncrafting becomes ever more apparent as not only the method and tools for production, but also to tell stories and address deeper concerns about the Anthropocene. The brilliance of The Yarned River as an artwork and The River Yarners as a collective, is belied by the modesty of its makers, their humble folk fibre techniques and their community engagement to facilitate a means for lasting environmental change.
Conceived during the Black Summer fires that began in late 2019 and raged well into 2020, Jon Campbell: No Planet B (2021) is an artist book created by Australian visual artist and musician Jon Campbell, produced and published by Bronwyn Johnson with design and production by Aaron Beehre from Ilam Press. Intended to be an accessible book of contemporary art prints that can be removed like pages of a drawing pad, the work is effectively an environmental art starter pack, containing 15 Rizograph prints by one of the country’s leading Pop artists.
The project in many ways came about by accident, evolving from a growing list of climate related expressions seen on placards or heard in person by Bronwyn Johnson, who was the executive director of CLIMARTE – Arts for a Safe Climate. When off-handed remarks popped up in conversation, the news or in print, Johnson would add them to her list: a friend’s frustration expressed in “a breathing space between disasters would be good”; Bruce Pascoe’s suggestion to “grow lettuce”; and “I’ll be less activist, when you be less shit” amongst the list.
As the bushfires continued to rage in January 2020, and a seemingly endless series of natural disasters unfolded around the globe, Johnson got in contact with long-time friend Campbell with a proposal to turn these sayings and environmentally charged quips into a visual art collaboration – as she perceptively noted, who better to do this than an artist with a keen sense of the vernacular?
Campbell has been a mainstay in the Australian visual art and music scenes since the early 1980s, drawing on his upbringing in Melbourne’s western suburbs: pop culture, rock ‘n’ roll, wry and self-deprecating humour, the overlooked and undervalued – the Australian spirit of the underdog.
For this collaboration, Campbell employed the skills of Aaron Beehre to produce the edition of prints using the Risograph – a digital duplicator first produced in 1980 by the Riso Kagaku Corporation. It uses a form of printing that exists between a conventional photocopier and a laser printer, with similarities to silk screen; a single colour is laid down at a time. After the source image is sent through the machine, a master copy is produced that contains
Image JON CAMPBELL No Planet B (detail), 2021
Produced by Bronwyn Johnson, designed and printed by Aaron Beehre Risograph prints on paper, 41 x 30cm each
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
microscopic holes from thermal heads. This is then wrapped around a drum, and the ink is forced through the holes in the master copy as it rotates at high speed, printing soy-based ink onto flat sheets of uncoated paper. Campbell has drawn on the luminosity of this retro pop culture idiom to reinterpret the droll wit and incisiveness of Johnson’s text – if the text cues weren’t so current, one could be excused for thinking they might be long lost band posters from the past.
Louisa Waters’ Untitled (2020) offers a poignant commentary on the impact of European colonisation on the Australian landscape and the lasting damage it has wrought. For Waters, the intersection of history and landscape is of primary interest as it shapes our memories, stories, and ideology about the places we know, and in turn, influences how we perceive and treat the land.
Untitled is composed of two parts - a charcoal and conte drawing and a looped video of historical photographs. The drawing portrays the pre-European bush landscape, while the video showcases the contemporary landscape marked by human intervention. The two parts work together to convey the historical and contemporary landscapes and highlight our impact on the lands we inhabit. Using a range of mediums, including drawing, photography, print, and film, Waters creates a tapestry of social and cultural history that examines ideas of trace, ruin, archive, ecology, and empire with a particular focus on narratives of fire. Through her work, she critiques European fire regimes and explores the transformation of Gippsland/Gunnaikurnai land since colonisation.
In the current age, human interventions have a significant impact on the fragile ecologies we rely on, making Waters’ work all the more pervasive and timely. Her work encourages us to reflect on our relationship with the environment and consider the role we play in shaping the lands on which we live. By drawing attention to the intersection of history and landscape, Waters invites us to recognise the stories we tell ourselves about our land and how they shape our understanding of it. Untitled is a powerful reflection on the impact of colonisation on the Australian landscape and a call to action to engage with the complex histories of our environment. Her work challenges us to reflect on our relationship with the land and the ways in which our stories shape our perception of it.
Marzena Wasikowska is a Canberran visual artist specialising in digital and photomedia. She has been practising in portraiture and landscape photography since the mid-1980s and is currently pursuing a PhD in Photography and Media Arts at the Australian National University.
Her landscape photography is inspired by fieldwork and studio meditations on the natural world, with a particular focus on the impact of human-induced Climate Change. One of Wasikowska’s most recent bodies of work, included in Carbon Neutral, is Earth’s Self Correcting Systems (2014-2022), which includes the Gold Coast and Alaska Series. This work is a response to the urgent environmental predicament we face and proposes an ecological notion of ‘the sublime’ - that we stand before nature in awe and wonder, questioning the devastating effects we have unleashed on our planet. This contemporary interpretation of the Sublime merges the aesthetics of the wild and untouched landscape with the reality of its collapse due to our interventions on the planet.
Image LOUISA WATERS
Untitled, 2020
Charcoal and conte on paper, 116cm x 256cm, single channel video, 16’00” looped
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
The Alaska Series captures the impact of Climate Change on glaciers and coastal environments, emphasising the need for us to acknowledge and address the changes happening on our planet. Although the events may seem localised, the melting of glaciers affects changes worldwide, including rising sea levels and a decline in the planet’s ability to reflect solar radiation back into space. Remains of the Glacier (2014-2022), for instance, explores the inflow of fresh water from melting glaciers into seawater, changing the pattern of ocean currents. Through her large-scale digitally manipulated photographs, she encourages us to reflect on our relationship with the environment and the impact of our actions.
G.W. Bot is a Canberra-based contemporary artist working across printmaking, sculpture, painting, and drawing. Her pseudonym is derived from ‘le grand Wam Bot’, the term used by early French explorers to describe the wombat, an animal that she has adopted as her totem. Throughout her career she has developed her own language of glyphs and symbology to express her close, personal relationship with the Australian landscape and explore the significance of plants and their emblematic meanings.
In Canberra, we inhabit natural grasslands and woodlands that are rapidly disappearing due to rampant urban overdevelopment. G.W. Bot’s practice urges us to pause and reconsider our actions before we destroy the very things that we will need the most to sustain ourselves and the earth in a carbon-neutral future.
G.W. Bot’s work included in Carbon Neutral, titled Grass and Cypress Glyphs - The Tree of Life (2022), is a monumental piece that showcases both scale and aesthetic resolution. The work is comprised of 12 skeletal cypress trees cut from sheets of rusted steel, with a central panel made from tapa cloth. It occupies an entire wall, yet draws the viewer in to explore and discover the relationships within and on the nuanced surfaces of both steel and tapa. By giving voice to these materials, G.W. Bot hopes that her work will have a meaning that is intuitively perceived by the viewer. These choices are intended to convey the symbolism of the materials themselves: by juxtaposing the Cypress tree, which symbolises strength and immortality through the use of steel, with the grasslands, its impermanence represented by the pliable, organic cloth made from the bark of a tree.
In history, the cypress tree was considered to be a symbol of permanence, and its wood was supposedly used to build Noah’s Ark. In contrast, grass was viewed as ephemeral, as Psalm 103:15-16 states: “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” Despite its scale, there is a spiritual poignancy invested into this marvellous work.
Cover MARZENA WASIKOWSKA Earth’s Self Correcting Systems, Alaska Series 5, 2014-2022 Inkjet on Ilford Rag / Hahnemühle 123 x 83cm, ed. 1/5
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image G.W. BOT
Grass and cypress Glyphs – the Tree of Life, 2022 Steel and tapa cloth, 225 x 1000cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image ANNE ZAHALKA
Emu, Riverina District of New South Wales, 2019
Archival pigment ink on rag paper, 80 x 98cm
Photo by Anne Zahalka
Also presented in Carbon Neutral are a series of recent works by contemporary Australian photo-media artist Anne Zahalka, who has exhibited both nationally and internationally for over three decades. Drawing from her series Wild Life, Australia (2019) and Lost Landscapes (2020), Zahalka creates images that at a glance are wholly believable, but quickly reveal themselves to be far from the truth. Zahalka has a long history of using photography and digital manipulation to construct images that read as a split second in a non-existent stage play, caught at exactly the right moment - if one looks too long, it is believable that someone might move. It is in this liminal moment that she entices the viewer in to uncover what feels familiar yet simultaneously alien.
Zahalka has addressed the Climate Crisis throughout her career, subtly refining and tweaking as she goes. Using photographs of historic dioramas of the Australian landscape once found in natural history museums as a point of departure, the dated scenes are digitally manipulated, hand-coloured and interfered with to recontextualise their meanings and implications in our contemporary society. The viewer may glance at an image and find it to be instantly believable, albeit a moment of incredible synchronicity perfectly encapsulating her intent. Only on deeper inspection do we discover that the flora and fauna in the foreground are lifeless taxidermy; the middle and background of the image are an illusion physically painted on the old diorama wall, and elements such as wind turbines and solar panels are digital additions. The fact that such vastly differing modes of visual language can harmoniously gel to produce fresh narratives that fill us with hope is testament to Zahalka’s strength as a key Australian artist and a voice for environmental awareness.
Many people will have been at strikes and rallies in recent years and started living off grid, recycling, growing their own veggies, switching banks and energy providers to green alternatives, and working on schemes to fight global heating. This is all part of what Prof. Christof Mauch, director of the Rachel Carson Centre calls ‘Slow Hope’, which involves taking small steps to turn the tide and save the planet. Carbon Neutral artists contributed to this effort by dedicating their practices to the most urgent issue of our times, inspiring reflection, and optimism for the future.
Alexander Boynes Curator
Image ANNE ZAHALKA
The Mallee, near Benetook in Sunraysia Region of Victoria, 2019
Archival pigment ink on rag paper, 80 x 80cm
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
Image ANNE ZAHALKA Koala, Yarra River at Woori Yallock, Victoria Archival pigment ink on rag paper, 80 x 80cm
Image ANNE ZAHALKA
Gnarnayarrahe Waitairie from Roebourne, Western Australia in the region of New South Wales, 2019 Archival pigment ink on rag paper, 80 x 80cm
Image Carbon Neutral installation, 2022
Photo by Brenton McGeachie
