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Exhibition Catalogue

Our era has normalised ecological polycrisis. Living with a persistent sense of environmental doom has consequences, many of which we are only now beginning to understand. One such consequence is the widespread emergence of eco-anxiety: a term used to describe chronic distress and fear in response to environmental harm. In a matter of a few years, the term has gone from a fringe idea to an established psychological condition, increasingly recognised by bodies such as UNICEF and by health experts as a profound stressor affecting both children and adults. Eco-anxiety lives with its sad and angry siblings, eco-grief and eco-rage, in human hearts and bellies, brewing and fermenting, as we witness environmental crisis after crisis pile up around us. The states of overwhelm, cynicism or nihilism this generates can be a source of artistic inspiration, but can also - quite understandably - paralyse artistic production, especially when the scale and scope of environmental decline is even partially comprehended. Living in a world where multiple, unfolding ecological crises are the norm has also, in some cases, been generative, as the experience of collective trauma has powered a new generation of artists acclimated to living with disaster, and to staying with the trouble. The global ecological turn in contemporary art is particularly strong in South Australia, where artists live so closely to nature, and where the experience of ecological crisis is felt with particular intensity. The proximity to powerful, threatened landscapes results in a rich body of art and artists inspired by ecological themes, and within that, a critical stream of practice interested in observing and reflecting ecologically, but also intervening materially to enact ecological remediation.

Leaves: Eco-Anxiety brings together the work of seven South Australian artists whose practices converge around notions of remedying environmental harms. Their starting point is that they take the diagnosis of contemporary ecological polycrisis, and living with eco-anxiety, as given. (At the time of writing, the devastating algal bloom crisis of the last year had been recently lapped by the incoming avian flu crisis, punctuated by threats of a super-charged summer El Nino on the way). This is not to say that these artists accept that the conditions of our world are in any way inevitable or natural. Quite the opposite; what links these artists, despite their divergent backgrounds and artistic concerns, is their refusal to accept ongoing ecological devastation as something individuals can do nothing except feel anxious about. In their different ways, these seven highly original artistic responses to ecological crisis all instigate concrete actions through which agency can be exercised, offering us remedies for working our way through our unjustly damaged world.

Bryce Cawt

Bryce Cawte (Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha), Smoking Ceremony, 2026, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Clare Elvia.

Bryce Cawte is a Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha man who is an educator, advocate, sculptor and wood burner. His practice involves cultural work, where, via workshops, talks, tours and welcomes, he works to expand understanding of Kaurna culture and sovereignty. One of Bryce’s specialties is sharing knowledge about native plants. For a number of years, Cawte has researched native species endemic to the Kaurna plains and neighbouring regions, a process in which, in collaboration with elders and mentors, he has deepened and extended his understanding of the specificities of local species, their individual ways, habits and needs as a fundamental part of Kaurna culture as practised in this Country. Cawte’s highly developed body of knowledge about local tree species, their place in local ecologies and role in Kaurna truth-telling about this place, informs his ongoing practice as an educator and as an exhibiting sculptor. As part of his cultural work, he salvages timber and transforms it into objects for use in storytelling and education. Cawte’s salvage work connects different contexts, from redirecting and re-using materials sourced from domestic and even familial situations, to activist interception of timber from felling activities taking place locally on Country. Cawte is as passionate about reducing waste and re-using resources as he is about educating about Country, and he sees these actions as part of the same relational system of practical action. The three coolamon vessels on display contain eucalyptus leaves and nuts for inclusive, multisensory exploration, recognising that there are many ways of understanding, accessing and participating in cultural space, and growing cultural understanding. Nearby, eucalyptus leaves suspended in jars of oil continue a slow process of infusion. Held in liquid, the leaves gradually release their properties into another substance, embodying Cawte’s interest in the ways knowledge of plants comes through handling, use, observation and time. There is a metaphor for the many processes of education in his work as well - something that comes in bursts of body-based knowing, through tactile encounter, but also seeps in slowly, as ideas take time to infuse and become one’s own.

Bryce Cawte (Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha) workshop on making Coolamons at Pirltawardli (Possum Park). Photography by Peter Fong.

This sense of knowledge as something living and continually growing takes another form in Cawte’s hand-shaped sculpture of a eucalyptus leaf mounted in a tree stump. The artist has cut pieces from its surface, each intervention speaking to something he has learned from another person and incorporated into his own understanding. The work gives physical form to the way knowledge operates as an accumulative and relational process that is stored across many bodies in the community, and across time. Cawte’s expertise has developed through years of research and practice, but also through listening to Elders, mentors, family and others who have shared knowledge with him. The leaf bears the marks of successive cuts, holding this continuing process of learning in its form. Also exhibited in Leaves: Eco-Anxiety are two text-based works by Cawte which highlight phrases he is known to share in workshops and other cultural work. These works foreground the role of words as a medium in Cawte’s practice, operating in a post-object artistic space between pragmatic instruction, poetry, activist slogans and instructional traditions of Conceptual art. These chosen phrases - “The “The single best thing you can do to care for Country is plant native plants” plants” and “Leave “Leave the fkn trees alone” alone” - speak to environmental and cultural concerns at once immediate and ongoing. The first phrase reflects Cawte’s considered educational practice, in which knowledge about Kaurna culture and Country is accompanied by practical ways of acting on that knowledge. Planting native species is an action that is strategic and practical for Cawte, as it is deliberately achievable - something that can begin in the most modest domestic garden, however small. Against the overwhelming backdrop of ongoing ecological crisis, the artist emphasises what can be done, by anyone, here and now, if they want to care for Country. Cawte helps us to locate hope in practical action, via acts of care that can be repeated and shared. What happens on an individual level can then grow, scaled up to a family, a community, a suburb, and beyond.

Cawte’s proposition - that there are concrete actions through which ecological agency can be exercised - is fundamental to Leaves: Eco-Anxiety as a whole. We need to begin here, before turning to the exhibition’s other contemplative, ritual and speculative responses to ecological distress, to frame the exhibition as a whole with the wisdom and knowledge generously shared by Cawte in his work in the exhibition. Cawte’s artwork affirms the possibility that care for Country can take a practical form - a form that is widely accessible, and achievable. Cawte’s second phrase gives voice to the other side of this proposition. Tucked around the corner, discreetly accompanied by a language warning, “Leave the fkn trees alone” conveys the utter frustration produced when such care is disregarded. Responding to the recent death warrant issued for significant trees growing within culturally significant Pirltawardli / Possum Park in North Adelaide, the work combines exasperation with grief and political urgency in a blunt instruction. When read together, the two works say, plant what belongs here; protect what remains.

Bryce Cawte (Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha) workshop on creating medicinal eucalyptus balm. Photography by Lana Adams.

Crista 10

a Bradshaw Crista Bradshaw (Wangkumara), Between the Archives: an Indigenous Perspective, 2026, City of Adelaide’s ART POD. Photography by Lana Adams.

Crista Bradshaw (Wangkumara), Between the Archives: an Indigenous Perspective, 2026, City of Adelaide’s ART POD. Photography by Lana Adams.

Wangkumara artist Crista Bradshaw’s practice often engages the physical traces and elements of Country, including leaves, sticks, branches and earth, in complex mixed-media installations. The viewer’s entry to Leaves: EcoAnxiety is framed by Crista Bradshaw’s work, consisting of eucalyptus leaves in two different forms. On the inside of ACE’s front window, directly above the entrance, a cascade of translucent eucalyptus leaf decals, made of acetate printed with black, pours down from the ceiling across the windows. These leaves serve more than a decorative purpose. Originally produced for Between the Archives: an Indigenous Perspective at City of Adelaide’s ART POD, they emerged from Bradshaw’s Indigenist research methodology applied to an engagement with the City of Adelaide Archives. She examines the ways maps, records and administrative documents have been used to define, claim and overwrite Tarntanya on Kaurna Yarta. Her work draws attention to and critiques the authority accorded to these colonial records, questioning their legitimacy and reconsidering the histories, knowledge and continuing custodianship they leave out.

Recontextualised for a second showing here at Leaves Leaves,, Bradshaw’s sheer eucalyptus leaves carry this archival critique into the exhibition’s ecologicalrepair realm with an emphasis on the eucalyptus as an Entity within Indigenous knowledge systems and interconnected ways of understanding the world. Their black and white forms suggest specimens, impressions or records of something once living. Their ghostly shapes recall the violence of colonisation against First Nations people, the transformation of Country that accompanied it, as well as the ongoing violence wrought by a system that continues to think extractively, in terms of natural “resources”, rather than acknowledge non-human systems of ancestral presence, care and custodianship. The eucalyptus leaf persists outside and beyond the archive, belonging to living systems of Country that precede the colonial construction of the city, and continue within, despite and through it albeit in frequently threatened states - to this day. Suspended on the glass above ACE’s entrance, Bradshaw’s apparitional eucalyptus leaves ask whose knowledge, extracted how, determines how Country is seen, recorded and cared for? What becomes possible when the colonial record ceases to be the primary authority through which we understand the land occupied by the city? Bradshaw’s other leaves are the piles of long eucalyptus leaves found softening the corners of the space. Freshly plucked from their stems for the exhibition, they come from common species and bring the material presence of the living world directly into the gallery. Their scent is immediately released further as the leaves are handled or disturbed underfoot. Bradshaw’s suspended leaves are intended to evoke the archive - remote, ghostly, immaterial - while the addition of the drying leaves give us the counterpoint of bodily encounter. Their presence signals an emphasis shift within Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Anxiety, from looking towards doing and sensing, via forms of action that are concrete, and are embodied.

Crista Bradshaw (Wangkumara), Bulina bunguandru nani (That one fell down from that gum tree), 2026, eucalyptus leaves, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photo courtesy of artist.

Jingwei Bu

Jingwei Bu, Temples of Time, 2026, Chinese painting silk, canvas, black tea, dried tea leaves, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Eucalyptus carries particular cultural meanings in the work of Bradshaw and Cawte. Jingwei Bu’s work embraces another leaf with its own significant histories of cultivation, ceremony, exchange and power: Camellia sinesis, sinesis, or tea. Tea has been central to the Chinese-born, Tarntanya-based artist’s practice for several years, functioning as a central material and a means of organising bodies, her own included, in private and live tea-based performances. During her 2025 residency at ACE, Bu held numerous tea ceremonies in her studio, extending a practice begun in 2022 in which the act of making tea and drinking it with friends, artists and other visitors itself became the artwork, as well as the post-drinking processes of keeping and drying the used lees after each session. These encounters fed into We Tea, Tea, her subsequent solo exhibition at firstdraft in Sydney, where accumulated traces including tea residues, stains, sounds and gestures, formed what Bu describes as a “living archive of shared time”. For Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Anxiety, these accumulated materials create architectural form. Two open, suspended, hexagonal structures create twin spaces within the larger gallery. The first is enclosed by panels of tea-stained Chinese painting silk which end short of the floor. Light passing through the silk is stopped by delicate brown stains recalling the familiar rings and streaks left by a cup set down on a table. Beneath them, dried tea leaves gathered through Bu’s long-running tea practice are visible in a fragrant, intentionally-shaped pile on the floor.

Adjacent, a second, five-sided structure is assembled from many small canvases, each marked with its own differing tea stains. Supported by a chunk of basic concrete, a tall tower of tea-stained A4 copy paper extends the installation vertically, completing the set of three structures with a testament to Bu’s sustained interest in paper as a material to receive and record the residue of repeated actions. As with Cawte’s emphasis on practical acts of care and the politics of reuse, Bu’s work finds ecological agency in modest actions that can be saved and repeated. Economy of materials is integral to her practice: nothing need disappear when the drinking is finished. The liquid can be kept and concentrated to stain silk, canvas and paper while the spent leaves are dried and stored. The gestures of preparing, serving and drinking tea return repeatedly through performance, as recently as in ACE’s Experimental Anarchive exhibition. Years of small encounters accumulate materially in the gallery. Tea exists in multiplicity here; foremost as leaf, but also as liquid, stain, scent, and trace, each state carrying the memory of another. The suspended structures are also places of encounter. During the exhibition, Bu will perform versions of her performance piece Tea No Tea, Tea, an intimate oneto-one work derived from the Seven Forms of Offering Tea associated with Song Dynasty Chan Buddhism. Sitting opposite a participant, Bu performs the gestures of preparing, offering and drinking tea without cups, implements, tea or speech. The participant gradually enters the same wordless exchange. Bu’s calm, engaged presence, her capacity for absolute focus on the other in the moment of exchange, guides the participant through the ritual. There is no right or wrong way to respond. There is no tea. What remains is the bodily knowledge of the ritual: hands hold an absent cup, tea is poured and received. Two people drink together. Bu’s removal of the objects and materials here is one of the cleanest, most conceptually elegant examples of post-object practice, so skilfully practiced for so long here in South Australia, concentrating the artwork on matters of gesture, breath, duration and the presence of another person.

Jingwei Bu, Temples of Time and Tea Tower, 2026, Chinese painting silk, canvas, black tea, dried tea leaves, tea stained paper, concrete and metal, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Jingwei Bu, Tea Tower, 2026, Tea stained paper, concrete and metal, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

This modest scale also unsettles some of historic performance art’s more heroic inheritances of endurance, spectacle and bodily extremity. Tea No Tea asks very little of its participant, beyond momentary attention and reciprocity. People who have experienced the work describe the encounter as deeply restful, an effect that is welcome within an exhibition concerned with ecological anxiety. Here, remedy takes the form of a small interval in which life’s habitual demands are briefly suspended in a restorative moment of shared silence. Bu will also share the knowledge involved in holding a Chinese tea ceremony during performance events at Leaves Leaves.. As with Cawte’s workshops, knowledge is transmitted through doing, in the bodily routines involved in preparing, handling, pouring, waiting and attending to others. Across Bu’s installation and performances, the tea leaf moves between its existence as material and object of social life. Its capacity to soothe is literal, but also cultural and relational, opening another consideration for the exhibition’s larger question of how anxiety might be met through practices of care and practical actions, however small and meditative.

Jingwei Bu, Temples of Time, 2026, Chinese painting silk, canvas, black tea, dried tea leaves, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Trud 24

dy Tandberg Trudy Tandberg, Score for Wetland Rejuvenation, 2025, paint and vinyl lettering. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

A different proposition for direct action appears in Trudy Tandberg’s artwork, Score for Wetland Rejuvenation (2025), the final artwork conceived by the artist before her death earlier in 2026. Tandberg was a printmaker, passionate environmental advocate and generous force within the Limestone Coast arts community, where her artistic life was deeply entangled with the particular local ecologies and environmental histories of the region. In 2025, Tandberg exhibited Cleaving the Woakwine at ACE and later spoke about the work as part of the event Push/Pull: Nature as Collaborator. Collaborator. Centred on the Woakwine Cutting, the work examined the extraordinary engineering feat that was achieved in draining the wetlands for agriculture, and the profound alteration of the landscape that followed. Tandberg’s score returns to these questions of contested irrigation and humanaltered hydrology with an idea that is both conceptual, and disarmingly practical. The artwork consists of a set of instructions, accompanied by coordinates handwritten directly onto the gallery wall. Tandberg imagined these coordinates operating like geocaching locations, directing members of the public to places where they might undertake small interventions, like digging a shallow hole, placing a sandbag, blocking or redirecting a minor flow of water. Individually, such actions are almost negligible. Accumulated across the landscape and over time, Tandberg proposed that they might begin to interrupt the drainage systems that carry fresh water away from former wetlands and towards the sea, allowing water to find its way back into places from which it has been systematically removed. The work draws knowingly on the history of the instructional score, in which an artwork can exist as a proposition for an action that may or may not ever take place. Tandberg brings that conceptual economy into contact with the physical reality of damaged Country. Her coordinates refer to actual places: the proposed holes, shown here as map coordinates, are holes that could actually be dug in those locations. There is a valiance and a defiance to her score. Against the immense ecological reality of a vast engineering project through which wetlands were drained and grazing land created, Tandberg proposes a dispersed counter-engineering, made up of small actions undertaken by many hands.

Trudy Tandberg, Score for Wetland Rejuvenation, 2025, paint and vinyl lettering. Photography by Crista Bradshaw

Trudy Tandberg, Score for Wetland Rejuvenation, 2025, paint and vinyl lettering. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Relevant to understanding this work is the role of participation and how deeply embedded it was in Tandberg’s life as an artist. A committed printmaker, she was active in Mount Gambier’s Thumb Print Workshop and transformed the historic Suttontown Chapel into a working creative hub, establishing studio spaces and printmaking workshops while restoring the chapel as a place for art, music and community to gather. Her practice repeatedly brought together hands-on making, the centring of the environment and the voice of nature and collective activity. Score for Wetland Rejuvenation extends this way of working into the landscape, distributing an idea among bodies, imagining many participants contributing individually small acts towards a larger outcome none could produce alone. In the context of Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Anxiety, Tandberg’s score makes agency tangible without pretending that the scale of ecological damage can be readily undone. Its instructions give the participant something specific to undertake, bringing the conceptual proposition down to the physical, material, embodied reality of hands, tools, soil and, eventually, water. The ambition of restoring a damaged hydrological ecosystem remains of course enormous - and to many, unthinkable. It is a testament to the scale of Tandberg’s vision that she could imagine this artwork, and an example of her deeply relational practice in the way the action assigned to any one person is deliberately manageable. Tandberg understood the force of collective activity; the amplification and momentum that happens when people gather to make, learn and exchange knowledge, and each contributes something towards a larger project or bigger collective goal. Score for Wetland Rejuvenation carries that understanding into her environmental practice with a conceptual work that proposes ecological restoration as both an artwork and an activity in which any person might find a part to play, or an action to take.

Emiko Artem

mis

Emiko Artemis, Anchorhold/Mystic Breath-Mystic Space, 2026, glass distillation still; blueboard, wood, dirt, straw, sand, ethically sourced animal bones, native and introduced medicinal, plant material, rocks, shells, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Tandberg’s score proposes that many small actions might eventually alter the movement of water through a landscape. Elsewhere in Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Anxiety, Emiko Artemis considers what kinds of action are available when the thing requiring transformation and relief is less tangible. Their installation and performances turn towards ritual, mysticism and the long history of symbolic acts devised to hold, carry, transfer or transform difficult human experience. At the centre of Artemis’ installation is an ornate but rustic single-person dwelling, its mudded walls embedded with animal bones, seeds, feathers, hair, stones and fragrant medicinal and native plants. Part cell, part devotional space, the structure draws particularly on Artemis’ postdoctoral scholarly and artistic research into the Christian anchoritic tradition, in which an anchorite or anchoress voluntarily withdrew from ordinary social life into a small anchorhold in order to pursue an intensely contemplative relationship with the divine. Around this history, Artemis has gathered a much wider body of research into mystics, magical rites, scapegoats, penance and practices in which one body becomes a site through which suffering might be expressed, witnessed or borne. These histories provide the setting for a series of performances throughout Leaves.. Throughout the course of the exhibition, Artemis will invite visitors Leaves to write down their ecological anxieties on paper handmade by Stephanie Doddridge from iris leaves. The collected papers will later be burned, their ash incorporated into a ritual led by Artemis through which the written anxieties are symbolically dispersed. The gesture makes no promise to relieve the conditions that produced those feelings: Artemis’s intention is to give anxiety material form, allowing something internal, nebulous, and difficult to articulate to be written, handled, handed over, gathered, burned and transformed.

This interest in ritual as a technology for carrying difficult experience extends through Artemis’ body-based performance practice. Their research has ranged across medieval Christian mysticism and traditions of penance to contemporary devotional practices witnessed during research in the Philippines, including rites involving extreme bodily endurance. Within the performances developed for Leaves Leaves,, the artist occupies the dwelling as a figure variously withdrawn, receptive and available to the anxieties brought to it by others. The work approaches the suffering body as a site of concentrated meaning, in particular, the notion of cathexis. Related to love and general affection, cathexis is a term from psychoanalysis now used more generally to refer to the investment or channelling of energy onto an object - here, the body of the mystic. Drawing on histories in which pain, sacrifice and endurance have been understood as capable of producing transformation for an individual or community, Artemis offers us the performing body as a lightning rod for difficult feelings. The artist becomes - temporarily, symbolically - a conduit for an emotional burden that might otherwise remain privately held. Artemis’ contribution expands the exhibition’s exploration of remedy into intentionally uncertain territory which is infused, deliberately, with resonances of mystical and arcane traditions which the artist makes concrete in physical performance rituals throughout the exhibition. Ritual has long provided structures through which experiences exceeding ordinary language and everyday understandings can be contained and given form, shared with others and acted upon. Eco-anxiety could be seen as belonging partly to this spiritual realm - while its causes are known, and materially real, its psychic dimensions are more diffuse and its spiritual harm is as yet not widely discussed or understood. Artemis creates a place in which those feelings can temporarily be deposited, witnessed, released and transformed through collective symbolic action. Of course, the ecological crisis remains, ongoing, outside the walls of the shelter, but for a time its emotional burden has somewhere else to go.

An anchoress or nun of an enclosed order locked in her cell; representing the monastic cell as the heaven of the loving soul. Coloured engraving, 16--. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Alycia Benn Florian Cinc 36

nett and co Alycia Bennett and Florian Cinco, Tambay-oke: Garden State, 2026, custom sound system, wood, metal, monitor, microphone, digital karaoke video, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Alycia Bennett and Florian Cinco, Tambay-oke: Garden State, 2026, custom sound system, wood, metal, monitor, microphone, digital karaoke video, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Where Artemis gives ecological anxiety a ritual structure through which it might be transformed, Alycia Bennett and Florian Cinco offer a considerably noisier form of release. Their contribution to Leaves: Eco-Anxiety consists of a purpose-built noise karaoke machine and, suspended alongside it, that ubiquitous agent of suburban sonic aggravation, a leaf blower, programmed to switch itself on at intervals throughout the day. Bennett and Cinco have a long collaborative history across experimental sound, performance and community-based practice in Australia and the Philippines. Their work together has been particularly shaped by DIY and self-organised cultural spaces, including Noise Garage in Las Piñas and Negative Space, Space, the community info-shop and art space they established in Adelaide in 2019; and their more recent collaborations at the artist-run, DIY infoshop/salon/artspace Share House in North Adelaide. These spaces draw music and noise into a broader culture of autonomy, skill-sharing and non-institutional learning, where the capacity to make something yourself also carries the possibility of making it with others - learning if you don’t know, and teaching if you do. Bennett’s own practice has continued to move between social practice, experimental installation and harsh noise, frequently using sound to test the boundaries between private and public space and disrupt gallery norms. For Leaves Leaves,, the familiar social technology of karaoke is rebuilt for experimental noise. A chunky, enclosed sound system recalling the karaoke boxes embedded in Filipino street and social culture, Bennett and Cinco’s machine sits in the gallery as an emphatically handmade object, decorated with egregious lightning bolts painted by Bennett, who brings to the task her unrelated talents as a nail artist. Its exuberant surface treatment is entirely at home with the sounds it is built to produce - excessive, self-proclamatory and uninterested in disappearing politely into the gallery architecture. The invitation to take the microphone remains, while the expectation of singing a recognisable song cedes to the less regulated pleasures of distortion, feedback and volume. There is an emancipatory history behind this embrace of noise as a political strategy. Across experimental music, punk, industrial and DIY cultures,

noise has provided a means of rejecting musical competence as the sole arbiter of value, encouraging untutored and intuitive approaches to composition and the rethinking of spectacular performance norms. It can be made with cheap equipment, repurposed technologies and sounds that conventional musical systems have designated undesirable. In Bennett and Cinco’s hands, karaoke becomes a piece of participatory infrastructure with a noisy undercurrent paralleling the rumblings underneath the everyday soundtrack of our lives. Theirs is a machine through which frustration can become sound, and a platform through which private feeling can briefly occupy public space. Their leaf blower extends the artwork towards absurdity. The machine hangs uselessly in the gallery until its timer activates and its characteristic roar erupts into the space, blowing nothing nowhere, out of range of leaves better served by a broom, as is so often the case anyway. Divorced from the yard-care tasks that ordinarily occasion its noise, the leaf blower becomes difficult to hear as anything other than an absurdly loud machine for moving leaves from one place to another. Its relocation into the gallery performs a simple détournement, a strategy of taking a familiar object, image or cultural form and rerouting it so that its usual meanings and functions become strange, conspicuous or available for critique. Here, a technology of suburban tidiness and control is reconfigured as an intermittent noise artwork. The transformation is not entirely benign. When the blower starts unexpectedly, its volume can startle, interrupt conversation and produce the momentary bodily alarm of an unwanted sound. It is going to be startling. It is going to be loud. (But then it will be over). In an exhibition concerned with anxiety, this, however, introduces a useful friction: Bennett and Cinco’s artwork deliberately allow agitation itself into the gallery rather than offering only relief from it. The body registers the disturbance before there is time to interpret the joke, returning ecological anxiety, briefly and absurdly, to the realm of physical sensation. After the quiet attention of Bu, the collective proposition of Tandberg and the ritual concentration of Artemis, Bennett and Cinco permit something less composed to be realised. Eco-anxiety encompasses anger, irritation and frustration alongside grief and fear, and these feelings need forms of expression too. Noise offers a deliberately unruly remedy: temporary, excessive, participatory and potentially funny. It cannot repair an ecosystem, but it can give voice to frustration somewhere.

Stephanie D

Doddridge

Stephanie Doddridge, In Studio, 2026, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.

Stephanie Doddridge, Holding, seeing through, 2026, bioplastic, native seeds, flowers, leaves, soil, eucalyptus branches, iris leaf string, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

The modest act of digging a hole, proposed by Tandberg as a means of redirecting water, finds another articulation in Stephanie Doddridge’s centrepiece artwork speaking to her long-term engagement with regional practices of ecological restoration with the ecologist-led regeneration group BioR. A corridor within Leaves: Eco-Anxiety is populated by a series of soil-encrusted plaster forms. These are casts taken directly from holes dug into the earth for planting native seedlings. Upended and given solid form, the negative spaces become assertive sculptural objects, revealing and emphasising the distinctive shallow, wide-bottomed profile that researchers have found gives young plants a better chance of survival. Described as a “frypan” shape, this apparently simple hole is the result of years of observation, testing and adjustment in the field, and was one of Doddridge’s key observations about the scientists’ iterative experimental practice and the humble yet impactful results their explorations have brought. Doddridge’s work emerges from a long-form collaboration with scientists and ecological restoration projects, and from her own participation in the physical work of restoration: digging, planting, observing and returning to see what has made it through the winter rains and brutal summer heat. The plaster casts bring this usually invisible knowledge into the gallery. A hole is normally understood through absence, as earth removed to make room for something else. Casting it and displaying the three-dimensional casts turns that absence into an object that can be encountered in its own right. Doddridge’s gesture here records and presents knowledge arrived at through doing. The frypan form contains within it the whole history of previous plantings on the site, including those that failed, its humble, useful form the epitome of the patient accumulation of practical understanding and re-contouring of countless experiments.

This iterative process brings scientific fieldwork into close proximity with the experimental artistic practices gathered throughout Leaves Leaves.. Everywhere, there is trying, attending to what happens, learning from failure; an altering of conditions and inputs, and trying again. Doddridge is particularly interested in the forms of knowledge produced through this sustained process of testing and adjustment, where failure becomes information and acknowledged as a vital stage, rather than an endpoint that closes down further experiment. Ecological restoration, consequently, appears in her work as a practice unfolding over time, requiring persistence, observation, perspiration, and a willingness to revise what one thought one knew. Ecological restoration, like Doddridge’s art practice, is deeply processual. Doddridge has adopted something of the iterative methodology of the ecologists in her own material experimentation. Over many months in her ACE studio, she developed her own custom biodegradable plastic, working through successive recipes and early iterations to arrive at a translucent biomaterial capable of holding plant matter robustly while still eventually being able to return to the earth. The material was partly developed in response to the locally adapted seeds cultivated and harvested by Bio·R at its Monarto seed orchard, which Doddridge wanted to bring into the gallery without enclosing them permanently in conventional petroleum-based plastic. Examples of bioplastic-embedded tool-forms, along with observations and reflections from her time spent onsite with the ecologists, are currently on show at the Museum of Economic Botany at Adelaide Botanic Garden in Doddridge’s solo exhibition, Tools for Quiet Activism.. Activism In Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, this experimentation takes a different form. At the end of the corridor of plaster frypan casts hangs a large circular screen made from Doddridge’s translucent bioplastic. Moving images projected onto its irregular surface were filmed by the artist during her time onsite with the ecologists, at the native seed orchard, restoration sites and community planting days at Monarto on Ngarrindjeri Country. Light carries these images of ecological work through a material that is itself the unfolding outcome of another sustained experiment. The screen retains the unevenness of something handmade and provisional, subtly interrupting, texturing, reworking and dialoguing with the projected image rather than disappearing behind it.

The expanded video arrangement brings Doddridge’s ecological and cinematic experiments together. Her footage documents the patient, unglamorous work through which restoration occurs, while its unusual projection surface makes the material conditions of viewing newly apparent. Screen, image and light become part of the same material experience. The work draws on expanded cinema’s longstanding critical interest in releasing moving image from the conventional, self-effacing flat screen and allowing projection to become spatial and sculptural, apparent and contingent. Here that formal experiment is inseparable from Doddridge’s experiments with how an artwork might be made from materials capable of decomposition and return to the earth when its exhibition time is over. The bioplastic is deliberately humble, and temporary. Doddridge’s broader body of work proposes that materials entering the gallery need not aspire to the permanence traditionally associated with precious sculptural objects. Her bio-based works are designed eventually to break down, becoming available again to soil, microbes and other living systems. Rather than buying new, she prefers adaptation and reuse wherever possible, drawing from her own store of found and repurposed objects and elevating artworks consisting of unworked, humble materials to the position of gallery-able objects. The exhibition essay she developed around Tools for Quiet Activism describes this as an “ethic of material reciprocity”, or an attempt to imagine and instigate materials whose usefulness can change rather than simply end when the exhibition concludes. Doddridge’s work has in fact been present since the viewer first entered Leaves Leaves.. In the front corridor, bushels of sweetly scented groundsel bring another dried plant presence into the gallery, accompanied by a soft, sympathetic sound artwork - representing the artist’s first foray into the medium - made, in part, to keep the plants that form the exhibition design in the entrance company. Scent and sound are dispersed and shared, establishing an intangible atmosphere of plant-based tranquillity through which the visitor passes before encountering the exhibition proper. These diffuse, sensory works also extend Doddridge’s attention beyond the human visitor, taking seriously the possibility that an artwork might address, accompany or simply acknowledge, with respect, the other living things with which it shares the space.

Reciprocity is another form of ecological thinking that drives Doddridge’s practice. In natural systems, abundance rarely means accumulation for its own sake and dispersal rather than hoarding is the order of the day: seeds scatter, plants propagate, nutrients circulate and what is shed by one organism becomes available to another. Gift economies follow a related logic, understanding value through circulation, relationship and mutual exchange rather than scarcity and possession. Giving something away does not necessarily diminish what is held; in the case of plants, sharing can actively increase abundance through the growth that proliferates after pruning and the backyard cloning wonder that is growing plant from cuttings. This thinking takes a simple, practical form in Doddridge’s Grow Free cart, positioned at the end of the entrance corridor and stocked with cuttings, seedlings, seeds and other garden materials, all freely offered for visitors to take. The cart belongs to an existing culture of neighbourhood exchange and is an established part of Doddridge’s practice, but within Leaves it also functions as a proposition about value and circulation. Plants leave the exhibition in people’s hands, destined for gardens, pots and patches of soil elsewhere. What is given away can grow, propagate and potentially be given again, creating a network of exchange whose abundance increases through participation. It requires no specialist environmental knowledge and no grand commitment from its participants - simply the invitation to take a plant, grow it if you can, and give something away if and when you have something to give. Like Cawte’s invitation to plant native species, Tandberg’s distributed acts of restoration and the collective planting days documented elsewhere by Doddridge, the gesture of the cart locates agency within actions available at an ordinary, everyday human scale. Remedy emerges here through participation, exchange and the cultivation of relationships - and plants - that will hopefully continue beyond the exhibition. Doddridge’s works, consequently, frame Leaves in several senses. Her plants, scent and sound surround and hold the visitor, accompanying their entry to the exhibition; her hole-casts and moving images lead us through the labour of ecological restoration and her Grow Free cart provides one route by which something living can leave the gallery to go on to proliferate growth.

Stephanie Doddridge, In Studio, 2026, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Lana Adams.

Stephanie Doddridge, Notebook: Witnessing, Monarto, 2026, bioplastic with embedded native leaves and flowers, iris leaf string, rocks, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Across the exhibition, circles, hexagons, holes, cells and enclosures recur as spaces for gathering, holding, concentrating and releasing. These forms seem to suggest a symbolic geometry, and their recurrence lends Leaves its own spatial rhythm as different bodies enter, gather, sit, listen, perform, exchange and move on, guided and held by these ancient forms in the space. The remedies gathered in Leaves: Eco-Anxiety are provisional, variously practical, contemplative, collective, ritualistic, noisy and strange. Some intervene directly in damaged ecologies; others work upon attention, feeling, knowledge or relations between people. Collectively, the artists demonstrate the value of trying things whose outcomes cannot be fully known in advance, and of remaining responsive to what those experiments reveal, and the new questions they go on to raise. Such practices give ecological anxiety somewhere to go: into a garden, a conversation, a hole in the earth, a plant in the hole; a ritual, a noise, a shared cup, an exchange. Across Leaves Leaves,, feeling finds its way into action. These actions celebrate the agency involved in caring for what is here, restoring what we can, sharing knowledge and resources, and experimenting with other ways of living more lightly, kindly and generously in relation to the world around us. Together, in different ways, the artists of Leaves: Eco-Anxiety consider how we might care for the natural world while living, as we must, with the knowledge of its increasing precarity.

List of Works. Emiko Artemis, Anchorhold/Mystic Breath-Mystic Space, 2026, glass distillation still; blueboard, wood, dirt, straw, sand, ethically sourced animal bones, native and introduced medicinal, plant material, rocks, shells, 174cm x 162cm x 300cm. Alycia Bennett and Florian Cinco, Tambay-oke: Garden State, 2026, custom sound system, wood, metal, monitor, microphone, digital karaoke video, 80cm x 80cm x 160cm. Crista Bradshaw (Wangkumara), Bulina bunguandru nani (That one fell down from that gum tree), 2026, vinyl decals and eucalyptus leaves, dimensions variable. Jingwei Bu, Temples of Time, 2026, Chinese painting silk, canvas, black tea, A4 copy paper, 480cm x 480cm x 274cm. Jingwei Bu, Tea Tower, 2026, tea stained paper, concrete and metal, 21cm x 29.7cm x 310cm. Bryce Cawte (Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha), Coolamons; Words; Eucalyptus Oil, 2026, coolamons: Wood, methylated spirits and xanthorrhoea grass tree resin, vinyl lettering, eucalyptus leaves, glass jars, oil. Stephanie Doddridge, Serenading Leaves, 2026, scented groundsel (Senecio odoratus), iris leaf and jute string, Audio file, 24hours. Stephanie Doddridge, Holding, seeing through, 2026, bioplastic, native seeds, flowers, leaves, soil, eucalyptus branches, iris leaf string, 160cm x 190cm x 150cm. Stephanie Doddridge, Removals: Soil Record, 2026, soil from Monarto Ngarrindjeri Country; plaster, 44cm x 15cm x 300cm. Stephanie Doddridge, Notebook: Witnessing, Monarto, 2026, bioplastic with embedded native leaves and flowers, iris leaf string, rocks, digital video, colour, sound, 21:36mins. Trudy Tandberg, Score for Wetland Rejuvenation, 2025, paint and vinyl lettering, dimensions variable.

Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, 2026, Eremophila (Pink Panther), Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Stephanie Doddridge, Grow Cart, 2026, Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. Photography by Crista Bradshaw.

Acknowledgements Curator

Danni Zuvela

Executive Director

Louise Dunn

Artists

Emiko Artemis Alycia Bennett and Florian Cinco Crista Bradshaw Jingwei Bu Bryce Cawte Stephanie Doddridge Trudy Tandberg (1971-2026)

Marketing

Harriet Culbertson Lauren Dilena

Support

Sally Francis

Exhibition Lead/ Catalogue Design

Crista Bradshaw

Sarah Tickle Michael Bradshaw Amber Standley Ben Rees Hana Alison Joshua Sleep Danny Jarratt Renee Pastore Madeline Coates Caitlin Bowe Allyne Kho

Publisher

Adelaide Contemporary Experimental

Installers

Support ACE is supported by the South Australian Government through Create SA and the Australian Government through Creative Australia. Stephanie Doddridge is supported by Create SA and Bio·R and has also been supported by the Porter Street Fund. Bryce Cawte is supported by City of Adelaide and has also been supported through a Carclew Fellowship. The performance program is supported by City of Adelaide.