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Waters is crafting something more than just a pleasurable shiver down the spine. She is describing the Australian wilderness, our well-known bush setting, in the same terms as the ominous forests of European folklore. In the cautionary fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers, it was the forest itself that was to be feared beyond any of the witches, bandits or wolves that might populate it. Imbued with a dark personality of its own, it was a place that might at any time abandon its natural properties, in order to fulfill dark designs. Trees might move, creepers creep and mists descend. This is the dark potential that Waters allows to bubble forth in her distinctly Australian depictions of our dripping caves, murky waterholes, desert storm clouds and freak bushfires. It makes sense: the Australian landscape has after all been a great villain, claiming from us Burke and Wills, Azaria Chamberlain and the victims of the Black Saturday bushfires. Waters is participating in the formation of Australia’s own gothic narrative. In America, gothic traditions formed after settled history grew long enough for ambiguity to creep into its early chapters. New England witch lore, rumours about Native American rituals and swamp Voodoo flourished against the backdrop of wild landscapes. Australia too is nearing a point where our history is long enough to inspire these imagined occupancies, curses or mutations in the landscape. We have Wolf Creek, Nick Cave, Port Arthur and artists like Sera Waters, whose narratives allow our landscape to become a dark character in itself. In this tradition, the sudden charge of kangaroos away from a waterhole in the early misty hours becomes a herald of some ghoulish event, rather than simple animal whim. This feeling is teased out in in Stumped: Together (2012), in which woven brown string and plywood panels form the shapes of two severed tree trunks. Lodged in their roots, a red ball glows through the woven thread. It’s unclear whether the light is natural, a deformity, or some kind of foreign body. In Soft Power: Stacks of Smoke (2009), a familiar grey hospital blanket lies on a shelf as two candlesticks hold vigil over it. A padded extension of fabric has been sewn on to the blanket, resembling a tumour or dark stain. It’s a simple work, involving little technical flourish, but its eeriness is palpable. Like the red light under the stump, it’s unclear whether this is the residue of some dark event or the first symptom of it. The only terribly flat point of the show was Butchering: Knife (2011), which lacks the pregnant ambiguity of the other works and triggers no special response. Waters’s exhibition was also concurrent with the Luminousflux exhibition of lightbased works, meaning it could not occupy the darkest galleries and was left to compete with the glaring natural light of nearby windows. A darker room with stronger spotlights would have made the lights and sequins of Stumped: Together and Sandbag for the Home (2009) really resonate. As an illustration of the goals of the Cruthers Collection, Dark Portals was a well-placed example.1 Despite their high level of technicality and value as a source of community, craft disciplines like needlework are commonly considered voiceless due to the domination of arbitrary motifs like flowers and dictums like ‘home sweet home’. Waters allows her work to explore entirely un-gendered topics, all the while maintaining respect for the heritage of her artform, and a high calibre of craftsmanship. Acknowledgement, rather than rebellion, informs Waters’s relationship to the legacy of ‘women’s work’. 1. The Collection’s sub-focus on self-portraits by women artists, for example, reflected in this show with Waters’s Self in Stitches (2012, acquired by the Collection among other works), reproduced in a CCWA-related article in Art Monthly Australia April 2013 # 258, p. 35. Sera Waters’s Dark Portals was shown at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth, in association with the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA), 8 February to 20 April 2013; a pdf catalogue available via the Gallery’s website: lwgallery.uwa.edu.au The CCWA recently presented the painting exhibition Abstracting the Collection at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 27 July to 28 September 2013, featuring work by Cathy Blanchflower, Elizabeth Coats, Debra Dawes, Eveline Kotai, Lisa Wolfgramm, Siné MacPherson, Michele Theunissen and Helen Smith. Sheridan Coleman is an artist, writer and scholar from Perth, currently completing an APA and CUPSA-supported PhD study at Curtin University of Technology on the manner in which digitised landscape imaging may be changing the role and the nature of landscape art. 4 2 2 6 4 O c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 art monthly AUSTRALIA
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Collective action: environmentalism in contemporary art JADE WILLIAMSON The Riparian Project, Stitching the Landscape, 2013, concept sketch, permanent public artwork for the Yea Wetlands, Victoria; ©Jen Rae Throughout the history of art there has been a tendency for artists to explore the natural environment in their work, and examine humanity’s relationship with nature. In recent decades, however, a profound shift in this practice has taken place. The emergence of climate change has inevitably altered the way we perceive our relationship with the environment, and consider the impact of our way of living. On an international scale, our changed awareness of environmental issues has had significant political, social and economic ramifications. In previous decades it was generally accepted that the changes to the natural environment as a result of human life and activity on earth were reversible; that they could be addressed and rectified. However, the scientific research and quantifiable data available today have led us to question whether these changes are in fact irreversible. This marks a dramatic revision in the way we perceive the future of humanity, the environment and ultimately life on earth, as an environmental crisis becomes apparent. In this context environmentalism and ecology have emerged as prominent themes in contemporary art. Art critic Yates McKee wrote on this topic in his response to the ‘Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’’ in October in 2009, establishing it as one of the central issues in contemporary art.1 Its significance is further exemplified by the plethora of environmental art exhibitions that have taken place internationally in recent years.2 For the purpose of this article contemporary environmental art refers to a particular strand of art produced in recent years that takes issue with the complex relationship between humanity and the natural environment. The first definition of the term ‘environmental’ listed in Oxford Dictionaries online is: ‘relating to the natural world and the impact of human activity on its condition’.3 Environmental art operates in terms of these notions and more broadly in relation to the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which we live where humans have become a dominant force in nature, driving change at a planetary level.4 The prevalence of environmental themes in contemporary art incites questions relating to the purpose of creating and exhibiting environmental art in the context of climate change and potential ecological catastrophe. On a fundamental level, a precondition for the existence of environmental art is the threat of ecological crisis. Environmental art operates in terms of this threat and responds to it to such an extent that if the threat did not exist environmental art would have no meaning. Accordingly a conundrum emerges: if the threat that environmental art is based on is real, what is the point of creating and exhibiting environmental art? If humanity is realising its finitude in the face of climate change, why create art rather than directly undertaking action to address the threat and potentially avert the environmental crisis? Is contemporary environmental art created in lieu of true action, or can it actually make a difference? One of the key implications of environmentalism and ecology for contemporary art is a tendency to go beyond art monthly AUSTRALIA 2 6 4 O c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 4 3

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Collective action: environmentalism in contemporary art

JADE WILLIAMSON

The Riparian Project, Stitching the Landscape, 2013, concept sketch, permanent public artwork for the Yea Wetlands, Victoria; ©Jen Rae

Throughout the history of art there has been a tendency for artists to explore the natural environment in their work, and examine humanity’s relationship with nature. In recent decades, however, a profound shift in this practice has taken place. The emergence of climate change has inevitably altered the way we perceive our relationship with the environment, and consider the impact of our way of living. On an international scale, our changed awareness of environmental issues has had significant political, social and economic ramifications. In previous decades it was generally accepted that the changes to the natural environment as a result of human life and activity on earth were reversible; that they could be addressed and rectified. However, the scientific research and quantifiable data available today have led us to question whether these changes are in fact irreversible. This marks a dramatic revision in the way we perceive the future of humanity, the environment and ultimately life on earth, as an environmental crisis becomes apparent.

In this context environmentalism and ecology have emerged as prominent themes in contemporary art. Art critic Yates McKee wrote on this topic in his response to the ‘Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’’ in October in 2009, establishing it as one of the central issues in contemporary art.1 Its significance is further exemplified by the plethora of environmental art exhibitions that have taken place internationally in recent years.2

For the purpose of this article contemporary environmental art refers to a particular strand of art produced in recent years that takes issue with the complex relationship between humanity and the natural environment. The first definition of the term ‘environmental’ listed in Oxford Dictionaries online is: ‘relating to the natural world and the impact of human activity on its condition’.3 Environmental art operates in terms of these notions and more broadly in relation to the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which we live where humans have become a dominant force in nature, driving change at a planetary level.4

The prevalence of environmental themes in contemporary art incites questions relating to the purpose of creating and exhibiting environmental art in the context of climate change and potential ecological catastrophe. On a fundamental level, a precondition for the existence of environmental art is the threat of ecological crisis. Environmental art operates in terms of this threat and responds to it to such an extent that if the threat did not exist environmental art would have no meaning. Accordingly a conundrum emerges: if the threat that environmental art is based on is real, what is the point of creating and exhibiting environmental art? If humanity is realising its finitude in the face of climate change, why create art rather than directly undertaking action to address the threat and potentially avert the environmental crisis? Is contemporary environmental art created in lieu of true action, or can it actually make a difference?

One of the key implications of environmentalism and ecology for contemporary art is a tendency to go beyond art monthly AUSTRALIA

2 6 4 O c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 4 3

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