May 2019
Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Arts Centre, Gymea

In Our Nature

Gemma Anderson, Lisa Carrett, Elise Catterall, Lizzy Halyard, Rebecca Hinwood, Hannah James, Alexandra Mitchell, Eva Nolan, Vivienne Pintado, Lana Prideaux- Remin, Sophie Rich, Douglas Schofield, & Rachel Seeto

We often like to think of nature as external to humanity. Logically, it may be. Yet nature is customarily measured using human values; through ecological and political lenses, religious associations and artistic interpretations. Impulsively, we overlay our perspectives, memories, and sensations onto nature, situating a reflection of ourselves within it. Universally, we as humans all have an involuntarily deep connection to place and nature; we have never existed on our own without the sky, the water, the plants, the animals and the land that sustains us. With the environment currently showing cracks, artists are reconsidering their relationship with the natural world around them.

In Our Nature presents a collection of contemporary representations of nature and botanica by thirteen emerging Sydney-based artists. This exhibition mediates and visualises our local Australian culture, which is imbued with a nationalistic and historical resonance to our landscape and the flora that encompasses it; nature and culture are interwoven. The botanicals depicted in the exhibition exude a palpable sense of Australian identity, oscillating between interpretations of our imperial heritage embodied in European flowers, and our traditional narratives through emblematic natives; both which can be found in the gardens of Hazelhurst. The attribution of these colonialised histories creates an ambiguous space of the familiar and the foreign.

Traditionally, botanical representations have involved recording plants for scientific documentation and environmental research. These illustrations are accurate and are often made using pen and ink, watercolours, oils and acrylic paints.

Communally, the artists have utilised contemporary artistic modes of representation, moving beyond the traditionally scientific and documentary, towards material-focused, emotive, tactile, and visceral forms. Contemporaneity is bounded within materiality, realised in the utilisation of substances and substrates: natural dyes, living organic matter, flowers, textures and fibres. The exhibition features a range of disciplines including contemporary installation, painting, printmaking, ceramics, drawing, jewellery design, photography, moving-image, textiles, and sculpture.

The duality of nature as both environmental and behavioural becomes evident within the exhibition, consolidating the notion that we as humans instinctually and impulsively feel the necessity to observe, engage, and interpret our natural ecology; an autonomous process of returning to our roots, an inclination towards a sense of closeness with nature. The landscape, often evokes our sense of the numinous, a catharsis or spiritualism, a primitive (re)connection with our origins through conversing with nature; ritualistic floriography, a dialogue through botanica. The featured artists externalise this.

The exhibition acts as an arrangement of diverse personal narratives and reflections, navigating each artist’s individualised and spiritual connection with botanica, void of mere documentation and replication. These conversations between artist and nature, stratify the potential for humans to not just perceive nature, but to have a reciprocal exchange with it through collaboration. These contemporary collaborations provide agency for the artists to explore notions of place, journey, form, intimacy, fragility, memorial, and memory, through botanical representations.

Although each artwork differs in intent, the exhibition as a whole fundamentally alludes to the inevitability of life’s cyclical nature. Ephemerality, that is, the concept of natural things being transitory, is consolidated in the works, exploring the ground between birth, growth, death, and decay. Numerous artists directly document their natural subject’s phenological variations, as signifiers of this passage of time: a moving decorum in decay.

Within the gallery space, nature becomes curated. Referencing characteristics of the organic, the works are arranged in a complex bouquet, avoiding uniform or regulated structure; a direct avoidance of linearity. Nature is not bound, but pertains discrepancies, it is sporadic, un-unified, dense and sparse; resemblance without manufactured reproduction. Hence, the works are situated within the space to connotate natural formulations, a garden of sorts; controlled chaos. This ‘garden’ provides a reflective space, an embodied experience, in which an audience can conjure or embed their own memories and narratives of nature, acting as an extension of the natural phenomena, as you transition from the Hazelhurst grounds into the space.

The artists selected have chosen a myriad of pathways back to nature – ecological perspectives or philosophical positions, while for others experiencing nature through art offers a deeply immersive and phenomenological experience. In an anthropocentric reality where artifice and synthetic spaces are normal, the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human ecologies are in a constant state of flux.