EDITORIAL
What does the onset of climate change mean to an artist today? We have known about species extinction for decades, and the death of ecosystems; artists whose work evolved around these issues first emerged during the sixties.
CSIRO science writer Simon Torok summarises the facts about how global warming is affecting every one of us in Australia. The marks of climate change, so far, are less tangible and Torok proposes that it is the challenge for art and science to help people see it. Torok initiated a project during his time in England which aimed at bringing art and climate science together through the use of objects and images to visualise our future climate and in turn provoke a strong emotional response amongst audiences.
Osborne examines and questions the validity of the South Australian Museums Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize in terms of its proposed intentions which lie in the educating of issues concerning Australias natural heritage and ecology. With a prize pool of $85,000 in total the event certainly offers incentive to artists and attracts many of the countries most prolific artists but in turn fails to provide any intrinsic value in terms of art or natural history. As Osborne concludes neither sales, nor attendance figures are sufficient to justify the museum devoting its space, resources and prestige to this ill-conceived event.
Ian Hamilton has approached some of the ideas surrounding sexual and asexual reproduction amongst organisms from a different perspective to those of biologists in his ongoing artistic studies. Hamilton began his work on bowerbirds when he was an Artist-in-Residence at Griffith University in 1976 during a visit to OReillys national park south of Brisbane where he filmed and videotaped Satin Bowerbirds as they worked upon their bowers. He has drawn many parallels between the creative processes of Bowerbirds and artists and over the years the ongoing extinction of these birds has come to be a symbolic representation and reminder of the harsh ramifications of human activity on the natural world. Hamilton is based in Adelaide in South Australia.
Finsbury is the only printing company in Australia to successfully establish an environmental printing brand, and over the years their environmental credentials have become so strong that they can legitimately call everything they do green. They are also the only commercial printing company in Australia to volunteer for the Federal Goverments Greenhouse Challenge Plus to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This article looks at some of the developing methods and strategies Finsbury Green Printing are dedicated to year after year in an attempt to become as environmentally sustainable as possible.
Liz Wood is a landscape installation artist whose work over the years has included covering rocks with wallpaper and embellishing tree trunks with roses. In July 2005 Woods was selected to be a part of Farming with Mary, a collaborative project which took place along the Mary River in four agricultural communities near Gympie in Queensland. In the case of Woods large-scale works in the landscape, their ephemeral existence has the advantage of avoiding a harmful environmental impact, whilst the visual impact is clearly assertive.
Ken Yonetani is an artist born and raised in Japan, and now practising in Sydney. Much of his recent work explores the intersections between consumption, desire, and human impact on our environs. He talks here with Julia Yonetani, who, apart from being Kens partner, is a lecturer, translator and writer on art, history, and things Japanese. This interview was conducted in Japanese and translated into English by Julia.
In his 2004 gallery installation Wetland, Michael Harkin used the familiar imagery of rainwater tanks and the gentle notes and timbres of water whooshing and gurgling to highlight to audiences the consequences of turning on the tap or flushing a toilet within the area covered by the local water authority. Harkin has based this project on some of the important issues surrounding water commoditifaction and consumtion as well as being developed within a framework based on the ideas of theorist Jean Baudrillard.
Photographer Bronwyn Wright has been visiting the local swamp lands northeast of Darwin with her dogs for about fifteen years. Her latest artwork at The Swamp draws on her knowledge of this piece of land and on her Spatial Sciences (GIS and Remote Sensing) studies at Charles Darwin University. It is a geoglyph, an earth drawing of a dog that is ecological because it treads lightly on the earth by using only human footprints to make marks that are visible from space.