ARTWORKS
CLIMATE CHANGE reflected in artworks A NOVEL EXHIBITION titled Gaia Hypothesis brought together the work of nine artists working with themes and materials “inextricably bound to human induced climate change”. Curator Ngaio Fitpatrick who has a background in environmentally sustainable architecture and is a Visiting Fellow with the ANU Climate Change Institute said “We live in a Post-Truth and now indisputably warming world. Science gives us hard data, politicians procrastinate and economists advocate infinite fiscal growth, all within a planet of finite resources and finely balanced ecosystems. “Artists are the new philosophers and have the rare ability to work independently of vested interests drawing attention to one of the greatest existential threats of our time using a variety of languages, methods and materials.” she said Here we present just some of the inspired artwork and excerpts from the catalogue shedding light on angles and interpretations.
ABOVE: Unpredictability of natural occurrences and weather events informs Anna Madeleine’s work Pranatamangsa AR. The work draws attention to celestial observances of cycles of natural phenomena used in traditional Indonesian farming calendars. Farming can be thought of as lowtech as it works with rather than against natural cycles; the installation combines simple still images and a counterpart of high-tech dynamism to consider the unpredictability of weather events in the context of climate change.
LEFT: Marzena Wasikowska works with the idea of unknown futures, using fragments of existing landscape to construct ‘plausible photographs’ in order to ‘motivate social response’. She references the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan: “I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”
54 AUTUMN 2019
