Wendy Teakel 'Remnants' / Noelene Lucas 'Entanglement'

CARBON NEUTRAL

WENDY TEAKEL REMNANTS

NOELENE LUCAS ENTANGLEMENT

Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 40 years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.

Front cover above: WENDY TEAKEL Remnant, 2021 Corrugated iron, native grasses, weeds, 106 x 52 x 330cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie Front cover below: NOELENE LUCAS Entanglement, 2022 Multi-screen video installation with sound, dimensions variable Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL REMNANTS

NOELENE LUCAS ENTANGLEMENT

Following page: WENDY TEAKEL To Begin With, 2022

Greenline pipe, joiners, shovels, tube stock trees 70 x 400 x 40cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL REMNANTS

Wendy Teakel grew up on farming country near Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and spent close to four decades lecturing in visual arts at the Australian National University School of Art & Design. After recently retiring as the Head of Sculpture at the ANU, Teakel continues to focus on her practice, working from her studio in Murrumbateman.

Teakel’s life on the land has been definitive in her career as a practicing artist, and she is well known for artwork that delves into rural themes.

In Remnants Teakel continues to engage with the concerns of Arte Povera1 and Environmental Art and our spatial and temporal relationships to land. The exhibition presents a series of installation pieces which investigate the fragile relationship between bush, farm and garden landscapes.

When conceiving the works for Remnants Teakel already had titles in mind: she says that in her practice “each artwork begins its life as an emotion”, from which a title is chosen, and from there the work begins to take physical shape.

Through her work in the exhibition, Teakel references the dire consequences of Climate Change and subsequent shifting environments, but also alludes to optimism and balance when becoming aware of our relationship with the land. Detritus – such as fencing wire, guttering, corrugated iron, broken tools and furniture – is first collected then manipulated and fashioned to form the main structures for individual works. These hand-made elements are combined with soft materials, including rubber hoses and living plants, to evoke vulnerable relationships and tensions which occur between human and natural systems.

An exciting evolution in Teakel’s practice is the addition of live plants in this exhibition. Four out of the nine works in Remnants include native plants such as the Royal Bluebell (the ACT’s floral emblem), different species of gumtree saplings, and multiple grasses and weeds. The plants add a peacefulness to the exhibition, and reference Teakel’s interest in regeneration and growth.

1

Arte Povera (or “Poor Art”) is a radical Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non-traditional found and recycled materials and objects.

LOUISA WATERS I am scared, I stand up 2019-20,

Watercolour and gouache on architectural drafting paper, 220 x 300cm, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

The larger installation works in the exhibition draw on Teakel’s background in performance art. Teakel remarks that “performance is about using the space, connecting through the piece with the audience” and this is evident in the scale of the works: one can imagine the artist moving through the space while creating them. The ephemeral character of the exhibition in itself is also performative – the plants grow and change throughout the exhibition, and will continue to do so beyond their life in the CCAS Gallery.

Teakel’s performative making is evident in To Begin With (2022). The largest installation piece in the exhibition comprises almost 50 gumtree (half brittle gum, half apple gum) saplings, lengths of thick rubber hose and six rusted shovel heads. A large circle of thick green hose lies on the gallery floor and there are six more lengths of hose at evenly spaced intervals around the circle that arc inwards. In the centre of the work, at the ends of these six hose lengths Teakel has attached found shovel heads. The gumtree saplings are placed carefully within the circle in a grid, stretching toward the sunlight that streams through the front windows.

Teakel has purposely chosen gumtrees known as ‘widow makers’ (giant eucalyptus trees that can randomly self-shed branches), as a reminder of the reciprocal damage that is possible when living on the land. The lyrical nature of the work is clear, with the arcing hoses, the growing saplings, and curves of the shovel heads: the viewer can visualise Teakel’s commanding presence in the space while persuading her materials to take shape.

In Poor Things (2021) Teakel presents two dead and broken branches of wild plum trees. Large rusted garden forks are attached to the trunk end of the branches. The breaks are lashed together by crepe bandages to form an inverted “V” shape, allowing the branches to support the forks a “digging position”. This piece speaks to this recurring theme in Teakel’s practice of ongoing human intervention and impact on the landscape and the cyclical nature of mans’ destruction and repair of the land. The work is stylistically and thematically direct and is an accessible entry point into the wider themes of Teakel’s installation pieces. In Poor Things the viewer may recognise the influence of the Arte Povera movement, and the concept of nature and humankind continually wrestling with one another.

This is also seen in Remnant (2021), the exhibition’s titular artwork. Teakel has planted a corrugated iron trough with live native grasses and weeds, around which she has employed three wire cylinders to hold the trough up above the floor. Teakel’s ‘thinking hands’2 are clearly evident here: the wire coiled into shape, and the carefully placed gutter slicing through them allude to how physical acts can become a way of working out our thoughts. This work is also an example of how, when nurtured, the land can thrive despite being scarred by iron and wire: Remnant has a tiny wattle tree and native bluebells growing cautiously but steadily within it.

Abandoned (2022) tells a different story: tufts of yellowed dead grass are carefully placed into decayed wood posts, which pierce through a rectangular cage made from fence wire. This work explores the concept of stewardship versus exploitation of the land, and reminds us that overuse and misuse of the land and its finite resources is leading us towards the global disaster of Climate Change.

2

Pallasmaa, Juhani, “The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture”, John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2009.

Mercifully, there is hope in Teakel’s exhibition. Teakel’s paintings, composed of acrylic paint, scorch marks and detailed pokerwork on plywood, are a reminder of the balance necessary to maintain a healthy relationship with the land. It Takes Time (2022) and New Beginnings (2022) are painterly examples of Teakel’s ‘thinking hands’: her mark making and washing of the plywood support are at once tender and brutal, and they speak both to the process of time, and the cleansing, cyclical essence of nature. An inconspicuous wire painted in soft grey traverses the surface of both paintings in multiple threads. The wire is only visible up close; seen from a distance it blends into earthy background tones. The sinister, encroaching nature of the wire is offset by, in Teakel’s words, a “glimpse of growing things”. Teakel has hidden a small painted stem of apple gum, a welcome sign of hope and renewal in the bottom right corner of New Beginnings, and It Takes Time has green speckles of moss interlaced in the wire as a signal of growth undeterred by adversity. Alongside omnipresent threat and loss, Teakel offers gentle reminders that a regenerative balance can be found.

An stirring inclusion in the exhibition is Regret (2021). Teakel presents a wooden chair, native plants sprouting from its seat. The chair is standing in a mixture of gumnuts and red soil, that has been neatly placed in a steel square. Adding a touch of absurdity there is a large rusted hand saw is attached, teeth up, to the top corners of the chair’s back. A departure from her typical pieces, the playfulness of this work is a welcome addition to the exhibition, inspiring the viewer to keep hope for the future.

Remnants presents a meditation on the relationships between the natural and the human with subtlety and elegant simplicity: each carefully constructed piece is uncomplicated, direct and unpretentious. Teakel’s craftsmanship elevates the deceptive simplicity of the works and proves that high level concepts can be made accessible through humble materials and mastery of method. Through Remnants Teakel offers the audience an important note about shifting environments, mindfulness and ultimately, optimism for our future.

Dan Toua Gallery Manager, Canberra Contemporary Art Space Wendy Teakel is represented by Beaver Galleries, Canberra

WENDY TEAKEL Remnant, 2021 Corrugated iron, native grasses, weeds 106 x 52 x 330cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Timeline installation, 2021, Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL Poor Things, 2021 Branches, bandages, garden forks 210 x 400 x 170cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL New Beginnings, 2022

Acrylic, scorch marks, pokerwork on ply 140 120cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL Abandoned, 2022 Fence wire, fence posts, grass 75 x 120 x 160cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL Regret, 2021

Chair, saw, native plants, gumnuts, steel 120 x 100 x 70cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Following page: NOELENE LUCAS Entanglement, 2022 Multi-screen video installation with sound, dimensions variable Photo by Brenton McGeachie

NOELENE LUCAS ENTANGLEMENT The distinctive carolling of the Australian Magpie (Cracticus Tibicen) echoes throughout the gallery, luring the hearer towards Noelene Lucas’s video installation Entanglement (2022). The bird’s sweet song is a cherished part of the Australian soundscape; it is a sound so familiar that we might not associate it with the profound risks of climate change, until our comfortable normality is punctured by the sharp commentary of Lucas’s activist art.

Entanglement draws on Lucas’s decades-long investigation of love, grief, and land from environmental and historical perspectives. Based in Sydney, Lucas has participated as an artist, writer, and curator in major exhibitions in Australia, Europe, and Asia. Lucas served as head of the Sculpture Department at the University of Western Sydney for 20 years, and she has taught at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University. Lucas is best known for her video art and its exploration of time and absence. Lucas’s work has long responded to issues relevant to climate change, with a focus on ecology, threatened species, and threatened places; her earliest work foreshadowed the potential for increasing conflict over water. Entanglement is a culmination of the artist’s decades-long interest in notions of impermanence, interconnectedness, and environmental activism.

Lucas refers to herself as a video artist with a background in sculpture. Her work pairs a sculptor’s physical and spatial awareness with the anticipatory potential of time-based video art. The resulting installations invite audiences to engage bodily by moving through and around groupings of screens. Entanglement follows this pattern: twenty-one flat-screen televisions for the most part arranged on the floor and connected by cables to a central power source.

Unable to experience the work passively from a distance, the viewer must tread carefully among the screens, peering down at them from above. Entanglement is simultaneously experiential, sculptural, and ephemeral.

Looped videos appear on the screens as evocative, non-narrative visual poems. Influenced by Lucas’s PhD research into how Zen Buddhist notions of time can be related to video art, the videos invite us to reflect on our relationship with, and reliance on, the natural environment. Each group of screens repeats a formula, establishing a pattern: a native Australian bird and its corresponding birdsong; full-frame imagery of moving water; multi-layered clouds in bruised hues; and bold text sourced directly from scientific journals, media reports, and opinion pieces charting our dismal failures in environmental stewardship: …We are losing nature experience and gaining extinction experience…. Only 30% of all birds are wild… Coal mining is criminal in a warming world… 57% of all water pollution is from dairy and meat production… Who do our politicians work for? the Australian people or multinational coal corporations?...

In addition to the Magpie, there is a cast of disarmingly familiar birds including the Galah (Eolophus Roseicapilla), Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo Novaeguineae) and Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus Moluccanus), while water and cloud serve as elemental forces reminding us of the inevitability of change.

NOELENE LUCAS Entanglement (video still detail) 2022 Multi-screen video installation with sound, dimensions variable

Two contrasting screens bookend the exhibition. The first is wall-mounted and presents an undulating expanse of water, a view of ocean or a large lake, with a hazy yet ever-present horizon. This suggestion of discontinuous continuity hints at Lucas’s Zen Buddhist and film theory influences. Blurred water droplets obscure the scene, forcing the camera in and out of focus like searching binoculars. Very occasionally, a seabird will skim across the bottom of the screen, offering a fleeting encounter with the common Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus Novaehollandiae). The video is overlaid with atmospheric terminology in white text (…Methane CH4… Carbon dioxide CO2… Particulate Matter PM 2.5… Chlorofluorocarbons…); the words appear, expand, and then abruptly fade on different parts of the screen, mimicking the ebb and flow of the water. The final component of the exhibition is a large screen leaning against the gallery’s back wall in portrait format, presenting an honour roll of bird names and their dates of disappearance: a tombstone for Australia’s extinct birdlife.

Even with its heavy overtones and ominous text, the beauty and serenity of Entanglement prod us to imagine a better future. As we encounter familiar wildlife in an unfamiliar setting, it seems possible, if only for a moment, to transcend grief through art. According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report “global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered”1, resulting in sea level rises, extreme heatwaves, severe droughts, climate induced water stress and significant impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity2. Courage is required, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac write in The Future we Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (2020): “…People feel real grief over the unspeakable loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, over how much we are about to lose, including the future of human life as we know it. Those who are enveloped by this grief may have lost all faith in our collective capacity to challenge the course of human history… It is important that we allow ourselves adequate time and space to deeply feel our grief… but we cannot allow it to erode our capacity to courageously mobilise for transformation.”3 Entanglement reminds us that we are not blameless for the climate crisis nor exempt from the responsibility to act.

Much like the good-natured and inquisitive black-and-white Magpie, which is prone nonetheless to bold defensive swoops during nesting season, Lucas’s work embraces polarity and complexity. Entanglement unflinchingly confronts the audience with hard truths, while remaining accessible and relatable. Lucas’s work highlights the transience of the natural world, revealing hope in dynamism: change is not only possible, it is inevitable.

Janice Falsone Director, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

1

www.ipcc.ch. (n.d.). WGI Summary for Policymakers Headline Statements. [online] Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/resources/spm-headline-statements/ [Accessed 12 May 2022].

2

Buis, A. (2019). A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. [online] Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. Available at: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperatures-matter/.

3

Figueres, C. and Rivett-Carnac, T. (2020). The Future We Choose : Surviving the Climate Crisis. London: Manilla Press. Page 5

NOELENE LUCAS Entanglement, 2022 Multi-screen video installation with sound, dimensions variable Photo by Brenton McGeachie

WENDY TEAKEL REMNANTS NOELENE LUCAS ENTANGLEMENT 29 APRIL - 3 JULY 2022 CATALOGUE DESIGN BY ALEXANDER BOYNES

CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE 44 QUEEN ELIZABETH TERRACE, PARKES, CANBERRA ACT 2602 TUESDAY - SUNDAY, 11am - 5pm

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www.ccas.com.au