EXHIBITION GUIDE
WrittenbyJohnBennett
This work emerges from Gumbaynggirr Country and the saltwater/freshwater people. We pay respect to the traditional custodians and elders, past, present and future. With special thanks to Uncle Michael ‘Micklo’ Jarrett.
The project specifically flows from a reclaimed wetland in Yurruun ga (Urunga) on the Mid North Coast of NSW An antimony processing plant devastated this rare habitat, seeding arsenic and cyanide among other poisons. After substantial remediation, the area is regaining its health.
The album consists of videos, supplemented by photographs, poetry and an essay We explore the aesthetic wonders the life of the wetland provides, celebrating an everyday natural aesthetics, as well as, its natural and cultural history.
THE VIDEOS
Sixty single channel HD videos of sixty seconds each are presented in three groupings with permeable borders.
1. Cognition - ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’, Paul Gauguin. An attempt to understand how we are embedded in systems that enable ongoing ecological collapse. [1]
2. Imagination - ‘The replacement of open meadows, woods and wetlands by lawns, golf courses, housing developments, provide little opportunity for exploration, but more importantly, for the development of the capacity for imagination. And we really need to imagine the as-yet-unimaginable racing towards us in order to have a prayer of survival ’ Jorie Graham[2]
3. Engagement - through citizen science, immersion, work and play. ‘We are living in a state of emergency. I feel that more than ever we must step outside the strictly art arena. It is not enough to make art.’ Guillermo Gómez-Peña[3]
The work explores, from a range of perspectives, a newly reclaimed wetland at Yuurrun.ga (‘long white sands’) in Gumbaynggirr Country at Urunga on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. The area is also called Gilayjal Miirlarl (High-tide Sacred Place).
John Laidler is the editor, composer and musician. John Bennett is the writer and image maker who regularly surveys the site for a citizen science project. The work is a collaboration in a sustainable manner, being low budget and low tech. It is also accessible, the majority of the videos being available on YouTube.
The album consists of ‘photographs’ that extend for 60 seconds. These are not edits excised from videos of longer takes. The ‘photographs usually contain movement, but motion is often scarce. Slow food, slow travel and slow television have been developing This project is ‘slow video’, despite each video being so constrained in time. These parcels of image and sound are always becoming open to what happens to the light, to appearances and disappearances. Chance is a key process to photography; serendipity plays its part.
60 seconds is neat but arbitrary, the number inherited from the Babylonians, who in turn, inherited it from the Sumerians. The earliest films lasted about 60 seconds (Lumière Brothers, L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, 1895, 50 seconds; or Repas de bébé, 1895, 54 seconds). When I began the project, we had no knowledge of Tik Tok which originally limited videos to one minute Initially, photography required exposure times much longer than one minute. Now mobile phones can capture movement extremely effectively in photographic or video mode. These 60 second photographs take much more time than a typical photograph and so, paradoxically, are not as obsessed with time, or with capturing success. The length can defamiliarise the familiar and bring a quiet energy. [4]
Yet, 60 seconds imposes its own formal qualities, and form is only useful if it makes you work hard to use it, or work to get around it. Without edits, zooms or pans (with a couple of exceptions), the images allow the eye to relax into the details. As opposed to images that are flooding the world. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp are the most popular social networks worldwide, each with at least two billion active users
The album features beauty, nature, capitalism, technology, complicity. It is discursive in nature, since everything is interconnected.
WETLANDS
‘Wetlands, being the perfect mix of terrestrial and aquatic habitats are among the planet's most biologically diverse ecosystems.’[5] Gregg Brill
On 26 January, 1788, the British land at Warrane (Sydney Cove). The next day, sailors from HMS Sirius disembark along with marines and a few male convicts. They start cutting, grubbing and burning Swamp she-oak (Casuarina glauca) and Swamp mahogany (Eucalyptus robusta). They cleared the wetland, rich Eora hunting grounds for fish, shellfish and yurungi (wild duck). We have continued to drain wetlands ever since.
In 1969, Broken Hill Antimony Pty Ltd developed a processing plant in Yurruun.ga wetlands to extract the heavy metal antimony from its ore, stibnite. Initially, the ore was sourced from nearby Newry State Forest and then from Wild Cattle Creek in Dorrigo. Antimony trioxide is used in flame retardants, metal alloys, plastics and increasingly electronics.
Gumbaynggirr men and women used to fish in the wetlands’ pristine waters. As a consequence of the processing plant, a whole swathe of poisons leached into the melaleuca wetlands resulting in them
drying out, with the trees also poisoned In 1974, the plant was abandoned. They walked away - no clean up was undertaken. This site was one of the most polluted natural environments in the State. Remediation (primarily NSW Government funded) was a complex task. More than 36,000 tonnes of soil and sediment had to be treated and deposited on the edge of the site under an engineered structure with 15 different layers Over 200 tonnes of poisoned earth was removed. In May 2017, the wetland was opened to the public.
Wetlands are important biodiverse habitats that mitigate floods, remove pollutants and improve water quality. They also absorb carbon dioxide, slowing global warming. With climate change, permanent wetlands are likely to become seasonal, and therefore increasingly ephemeral. Wetlands are vanishing faster than rainforests. Sea level rise is driving saltwater into freshwater habitats along coasts. Increasing salinity causes the stress and eventual mortality of a variety of coastal plants, and ghost forests eventuate. Tidal inundation and active shoreline erosion also influences landscapes far in from the coast. Directly or indirectly, they provide almost all of the world’s consumption of freshwater. More than one billion people depend on them for a living and they are among the most biodiverse ecosystems. Up to 40% of the world’s species live and breed in wetlands, although now more than 25% of all wetlands, plants and animals are at risk of extinction.’ The destruction is ongoing. A 2025 report states that 35% of natural wetlands have been lost since 1970. [6] [7]
Waterbirds live in a variety of wetlands lakes, floodplains, swamps and estuaries—providing food and shelter and safety from predators. By feeding on fish, frogs, invertebrates and plants, they help support the life cycle of plants and animals, and recycle nutrients back into the environment. Waterbird chicks and eggs provide an important food source for reptiles and predatory birds. Birds can also help keep agricultural pest numbers down by feeding on insects such as locust larvae and ticks. Waterbird species breed and feed in wetland
habitats They depend on healthy wetland ecosystems to breed, forage for food and roost.
So how can we develop a sustainable presence on the planet, particularly while we wait for politicians and developers to see the bigger picture, the long-term future, and stop the destruction of wetlands?
The waters were once clean and clear. Auntie Frances Witt, a Yurruun.ga Gumbaynggirr Elder, told me: ‘I recall my mother Margaret Boney saying how, as a small girl she would go fishing with her father, Andrew Boney, in the 1940s. The water was pristine. You could see the bottom of this creek and wetlands The sewage works, then the mineral processing plant, polluted these waters.’[8]
I undertake regular bird surveys at the restored Yurruun.ga wetlands. You, the taxpayer, paid for its remediation. Not the miners or the ore processors. The water is now clean. The waterbirds are currently scarce, having dispersed with last year’s rains. Nature springs surprises when allowed to. Comb-crested Jacanas and Magpie Geese have appeared on this southern tip of their range.
THE ISSUES
We you me everyone are at a fundamental crossroads. Our way of life for 99% of human existence, that of the hunter–gatherer, has just about finished, and in the last few years, the world population has become more urban than rural. Our agrarian revolution has evolved quickly into industrial production and factory farming. Nature has become a phenomenon visible on screens. This development is unhealthy not just for our physical health but wellbeing, as human unhappiness/dissatisfaction is widespread. Our relationship to natural environments is critical for healthy cultural landscapes and our physical and cognitive health. New technologies change how we think, feel and behave at every moment. These revolutionary changes affect not only us, distancing us from natural
processes and environments, but all other life forms that share this planet. Our current way of doing things is destroying natural processes and systems through global warming, loss of biodiversity, destruction of habitats and poisoning of soils, waterways and the seas.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) insists, ‘This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.’[9]
Change is needed, but what change and how do we achieve it? One way is to change how we think and feel, and therefore act towards ourselves, others and the natural world. The problem is we are embedded in capitalism/consumerism. Tsing asks us to consider our mobile phones: ‘Deep in its circuitry, you find coltan dug by African miners, some of them children, who scramble into dark holes without thought of wages or benefits. No companies send them; they are doing this dangerous work because of civil war, displacement, and loss of other livelihoods, owing to environmental degradation. Their work is hardly what experts imagine as capitalist labour; yet their products enter your phone, a capitalist commodity.’[10]
Kohei Saito (2023) calls sustainable development goals, ‘the new opium of the masses’, and remarks, ‘Buying eco bags and bottles without changing anything about the economic system masks the systemic problem ’ We can cycle and recycle, and we should, but responsibility rests with politicians and the corporate world who work economic systems for immediate gain. Their PR campaigns make us feel guilty and inadequate in attaining a sustainable future. [11]
The Australian activist Jeff Sparrow (2022) reveals, ‘This [carbon
footprint concept] was actually cooked up by a PR company that was employed by BP as part of a campaign to rebadge itself once people became concerned about climate change. By getting people to look at their own individual responsibility for climate change, it meant that people stopped focusing on corporate responsibility. And so, rather than looking at BP's part in this horrific damage to the environment, people started thinking 'What am I doing?'’[12]
For the first time, our species' ecological ‘footprint’ exceeds the Earth's resources. Today we need about 1.75 planets to provide the resources for our consumption and absorb our waste. By 2030, we will need 2 planets. We only have one. Jason Hickel (2013) calls our situation madness: ‘The growth paradigm at the heart of our system that calls for constant expansion and constant accumulation is so riddled with contradictions that it beggars belief.’ [13] [14]
As David Wallace-Wells (2019) laments ‘it is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all.’[15]
NATURAL AESTHETICS
‘We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes . . . We can never have enough of Nature.’[16]
Henry David Thoreau
Romanticism offered a new way of looking at the world, prioritising imagination above reason, but reason and emotion work together for scientists, artists and in the everyday. The senses, imagination, emotion and aesthetic experience are connected. This suggests the need for an interdisciplinary approach among the arts, media, science and politics.
Art for art’s sake is fine, but never enough. Artists can respond to the ongoing eco-crises by providing information and revealing natural aesthetics as rewarding so that it makes us care. The beauty
and the aesthetics of nature the wonders can give us energy and hope, and a concern for the natural environment we are immersed in. Life’s way of being in the world is aesthetic in the deepest sense. We come into contact with the world through our senses. The sensory apparatus and mechanisms of perception tied to embodied experience define the way the world is apprehended and determine to a certain extent what meanings we attach to phenomena This is an everyday aesthetic, one that environmental education in schools should use.
Western culture focuses on the visual to the detriment of other senses. Technologies exacerbate this trend. If we are immersed in natural environments dynamic and changeable we are offered multimodal sensory experiences keenly kinesthetic and propriocentric with touch and smell part of a full ecocentric aesthetic. We hope that our use of video technology in the Yurruun.ga wetlands project can entice people to explore the natural environments, including wetlands.
[17] [18]
[19]
I am interested in the aesthetic of interesting, which Sianne Ngai (2008) takes back to the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel and his notion of the modern being ‘subjective’ and interesting—as compared to beautiful, ‘objective’ Greek art. She argues that when we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves. Information is over abundant, data builds up daily, but lacks affect or meaning or interest. ‘Interesting’ covers multitudes, and this album covers a range of themes from poisons and their symptoms, to Walden (a publication by Henry David Thoreau), natural aesthetics, art, politics and much more
Photography was where ‘the interesting’ first triumphed and without any need for ‘the decisive moment’. A photograph may call into question the ways we see, think and feel, even the way we live, but that is rare. More often, a photograph can make anything interesting
or even beautiful I am being direct because people seem unaware of the current crises created from our way of using this world and each other. Digital capitalism is not helping, instead it seems intent on providing distractions. [20]
The Australian eco-feminist Val Plumwood (2002) argues that inadequate knowledge is at the heart of our ecological crisis (along with failed political structures, and our anthropocentrism all three being mutually reinforcing). In a 2021 survey undertaken in India, ‘children struggled to recognise the real picture of a parrot, honey bee and coconut tree, whereas they found it easier to recognise the cartoon picture of the same! It shows that our children are being exposed to an unreal, comic world more than the real, natural one.’ Patricia Mathews (2001) explains why knowledge of nature has value: ‘Once we learn the norms for a species, we learn to pick the object out, learn what features to look at, what features may vary, and which features are rare, all of which functions to focus our aesthetic appreciation.’ [21] [22] [23]
Attention to the aesthetics of nature offers ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’ in our everyday natural environment, which changes constantly, and is both multisensorial and healthy so much richer than any artwork. Natural aesthetics is one way of slowing ecocide by fostering optimism, rather than anxiety about the world. As Robert Dunn, a professor of Applied Ecology notes, ‘People are more likely to conserve nature when they have direct experiences of the natural world.’[24]
We hope the work prompts you, the audience, to venture out to experience natural environments and linger (try wetland / forest bathing). You may appreciate the natural values of these remediated wetlands, and think about how we, collectively, are treating this singular planet.
THE MUSIC
Some of these videos include composed music Similarly to the act
of video-making here, the music was often based on ‘what is at hand’, i.e. instruments, both real and virtual, already present in the studio. Often these were guitars of various kinds, but also virtual instruments, and occasionally, the found sound of the video recording itself.
The music aims to accentuate or attenuate the ‘mood’ of the video, as presented by the image or the voice. The soundscape tends to sparseness, and a sound stasis that reflects the static nature of the image. This might be described as a type of minimalism (though that term in music is very broad).
A truism in soundtrack composition is ‘if you notice the music, it’s failed’. So, hopefully, you won’t notice it.
ROLE OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS
‘The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on Earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the Earth.’[25]
David Attenborough
How can artists respond to the ongoing eco-crises? The problem is that culture dominates nature at all scales, from global manufacturing and money markets and military industrial complexes, to shopping and entertainment choices. As mentioned in ‘The Issues’, governments and corporations make us feel guilty, when they are the forces of destruction. Nothing escapes capitalism. Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, 2019 a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million in November 2024. (The ‘artwork’ was bought for 35¢). [26]
In ‘The Invention of Art’, Larry Shiner (2001) writes: ‘Western culture had no word or concept of fine art, viewed the artisan/artist as a
[27]
maker rather than a creator, and generally treated statues, poems, and musical works as serving particular purposes rather than as existing primarily for themselves.’ With titles like ‘A history of capitalism in sixty seconds’, there is obviously a didactic thread to this album. The arts competed with philosophy to persuade and inform, long before science was introduced into the equation. Or, when originality, inspiration, and imagination became considered central to Fine Art, we forget that our notion of art emerged from particular historical and cultural conditions which change.
In the video ‘Performance ~ swimming through mud’, I talk of Joseph Beuys performing Eine Aktion im Moor (Bog Action), to publicise the rapid destruction of European wetlands He ran clothed into a wetland, bathed in the mud, and then swam through a boggy trench. Wetlands are excised from landscape painting and art in general. Beuys’ embodied performance earthed art to these neglected habitats.
AI-generated work is becoming common with the claim ‘AI can expand creative possibilities while preserving human artistry’ Aesthetics is a mode of enquiry, a way to experience the world and sense what is happening AI sabotages this reality and the documentary power of photography. Digital images are becoming more ‘real’ than our reality. The film pioneers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, used trick effects, and George Méliès began his career as a professional illusionist, but they were never confused with reality. The reality is that the world is losing natural habitats, including wetlands.
[28] [29]
The role of the artist / writer is also that of citizen, a member of a community. We can involve ourselves in many ways, from using our art to being community minded. As I mentioned earlier, Art for art’s sake is fine, but never enough. Art cannot substitute for lived experience. Citizen science projects are becoming more popular and important. Sean Dooley, the writer and editor of Australian Birdlife
magazine, started birdwatching at age 10, notebook in hand, at ‘Seaford swamp’ near his Melbourne primary school. He met an older birdwatcher there and the pair began reporting bird counts. The data was later used to recognise the swamp as a wetland of international significance under the Ramsar Convention. I undertake regular bird surveys at Yurruun.ga wetlands.
Ursula K. Le Guin (2014) worries that our ‘obsessive technologies’ are so destructive that we have to find, ‘other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.’ Similarly, the poet Jorie Graham (2012) warns, ‘And we really need to imagine the as-yet-unimaginable racing towards us in order to have a prayer of survival . . . They feel anything remotely ‘political’ to be polemical and thus didactic. They feel they ‘know this information already, so why do they need it in a poem’. That is precisely the point. They ‘know’ it. They are not ‘feeling it’. That is what activists in the environmental movement are asking of us: help it be felt, help it be imagined.
[30] [31]
Poets often talk of their practice as barely conscious, but there’s plenty of room for conscious creativity, and from that conscious action emerges. Artists and writers have a role in helping us love natural environments. Love will bring forth care. Gary Snyder (2006) said, ‘Above all, we need human beings who love the world.’ He later added, ‘Poetry is to help people love the world.’ [32] [33]
BIOGRAPHIES
John Bennett is a poet/ writer/ visual artist who lives in Gumbaynggirr Country He has published five books, and won significant poetry prizes. He worked for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service then undertook a PhD exploring poetics. Since moving to regional NSW, he has been heavily involved in its cultural life. He reads poems live on ABC Regional radio once a week. He was Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival
for five years and taught ecopoetry at Camp Creative, Bellingen He has worked with Aboriginal storytellers for the Saltwater Freshwater Arts Alliance. His multimedia exhibition First Light - from Eos to Helios, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, 2017 was foreshadowed by a documentary on his working practice, Poetry at first light (ABC Radio National’s Earshot, 2016).
His first multi-media installation was Rhubarb and Pearls: Order and Disorder, The Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, 2007. The Wild Circumference – Antarctica, was a multi-media presentation played in various venues in Sydney, and performed by actors for ABC Radio’s The Listening Room.
He has won local photographic competitions and his images and writing has been used by local government, councils, tourist authorities, community groups, environmental groups, and arts and festival organisations. See www.photvoltaicpoetry.com.au
John Laidler was seized by sound many years ago, and has only recently given up trying to escape its clutches.
He mostly plays guitar, but he is passing familiar with other stringed instruments, such as the bass, dulcimer, and pedal steel, as well as the digital audio workhorse.
He was a founding member of Sydney post-punk band the Slugfuckers, and part of the Zerox Dreamflesh group in the 1980s. Currently he plays pedal steel with local country and rock bands, and records original songs as a member of the Gumbramorra Swamp Walkers, and the Okapi Guitars, in his studio under the flightpath in Sydney. http://cutsnakestudio.com
Beginning in 2008 a collaboration with poet and photographer John Bennett (https://photovoltaicpoetry.com.au) has produced hundreds of videos, and four audio albums, most recently Thirteen Ways of
Considering Black Birds, 2023 https://jbandjl.bandcamp.com/album/thirteen-ways-of-consideringblack-birds
He has composed music and designed sound for various independent film projects, including the horror motion comic Family Slaughter, 2020 https://filmfreeway com/projects/1812645 He has also produced several music videos, and, in 2017, a series of short documentaries on live music and venues in Marrickville (Marrickville Live! https://www.youtube.com/@marrickvillelive7125).
Together they have collaborated for over fifteen years on a wide variety of projects: music documentaries, conceptual works, and poetry journals. VIRUS 2020, a digital album from 2020 is on Bandcamp: https://jbandjl.bandcamp.com. A piece on the project appeared in Art Almanac, December 2020. Their most recent album is Thirteen Ways of Considering Black Birds, 2023.
REFERENCES - SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO WORKS
Cognition, 2021-2025
Welcome to Gumbaynggirr Country
Gumbaynggirr elder, Uncle Michael ‘Micklo’ Jarrett does so much for language and culture in his Country.
Poisons
6. Cresylic acid: ‘Without hope . . . ’ Barry Lope Claire Cazajous-Augé, ‘An Interview with Barry H Lopez’, Transatlantica, 2, 2017
7. Exposures: ‘Each year . . .’Julian Cribb, Australasian Science, December, 2015
A history of capitalism in sixty seconds
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, U of Chicago P, 1984, p77. Andy Coghlan, ‘Consumerism is 'eating the future'’, New Scientist, 7.8.2009.
Note: ‘The changes in the new model should be so novel and attractive as
to create demand…and a certain amount of dissatisfaction with past models as compared with the new one ’ Alfred Sloan, My Years With General Motors, Crown, 1963. ‘It became an instant bestseller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers.’
A history of democracy in sixty seconds
Gerard Winstanley in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, Penguin Books, 1975. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’, 1854 Based on a speech he gave at an anti-slavery rally.
A history of philosophy in sixty seconds
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton UP, 1979. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge UP, 1989.
A history of modernity in sixty seconds
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie modern’ (IV. Modernity), written 1860, published Le Figaro 1863 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, (1848) Verso, 1998. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: the experience of modernity, Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Note: Charles Taylor: ‘By modernity I mean that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution).’ ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, New Imaginaries Public Culture 14.1, Winter 2002
A Big Word - Nature
Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso 1980.
Dust
1. Note: The ‘russicot particle’ is not a recognized term in physics. There is no such particle known to scientists. It's possible that the term is a misspelling, a misunderstanding, or a new and unnamed concept in physics.
2: Joseph A Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, U of
California P, 2000.
3: Alexis Wright, ‘The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times’, https://emergencemagazine. Jan, 2021. She is of the Waanyi nation from below the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The News - Climate Change is here
IPCC report; BBC; France 24; DW; Channel 10 News First; ABC, Australia.
Imagination, 2021-2025
A history of music in 60 seconds
Note: At 34 seconds, a glimpse of a Swamp Harrier.
Engagement, 2021-2025
Performance ~ swimming through mud
August 1971, Joseph Beuys in car with photographers Gianfranco Gorgoni and Ute Klophaus, noticed a WWII bunker surrounded by bog. They stopped, Beuys got out and: ‘jumped again from hummock to hummock towards a deeper pool of muddy water whereupon he dived in fully clothed to a depth where only his hat was showing.’ Quoted in Caroline Tisdale, Joseph Beuys, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1979 Earlier, in 62, Beuys proposed project ‘Elbe Aktion’ (Elbe River Action) to clean up Germany’s Elbe, one of the longest European rivers. I can’t uncover any detailed information about this very early intervention https://www.withbeuys.co.uk/environment
The Isle of Innisfree Poem by William Butler Yeats, 1888.
Who Looks at a photograph for 60 seconds?
Michael Glover, ‘The Steely, Ascetic Countenance of a Cunning Diplomat’, in Great Works: Encounters with Art, Prestel, 2016. Amelia Gentleman, ‘Smile, please’, The Guardian, 19 October, 2004.
We are being asked to love this world
Tom Fleischner, ‘Natural History as a Practice of Kinship’, Minding Nature, Vol12:3, Fall 2019. Love, nature and aesthetics are closely bound, and love is such a motivator Love brings attention
Disembodied Red
I Send You this Cadmium Red: A Correspondence between John Berger and John Christie, Actar, 2000. Andrew Marr, ‘Why John Berger is the least theoretical Marxist on Earth’, New Statesman, 28, Nov, 2016.
What artists think of making art
Quoting: Andy Goldsworthy, Peter Dombrovskis, Olafur Eliasson, Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Agnes Denes, Fiona Hall, Ben Quilty –various sources.
The inadequacy of landscape painting
Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics, Columbia UP, 2009 James Corner, ‘Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice’ in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape, ed., James Corner, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, Yale UP, 1982 Joan Nassauer, ‘Cultural Sustainability’ in, Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology, Joan Nassauer Ed., Island Press, 1997, p68. ‘The picturesque has been so successful in becoming popular culture that scenic landscapes are often assumed to be ecologically healthy. But a scenic landscape aesthetic does not necessarily protect nature. It can be used to camouflage or distract us from actions that undermine ecological quality ’
The burden of art
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum 2004
Walden
1 1845: Thoreau, Letter to his friend, Harrison Blake, May, 1860
Clever Me
Note: Inle is a mountain lake in the east of Myanmar Some fishermen there propel their boats using one leg wrapped around a single oar, allowing their hands free to shuttle a cone-shape net back and forth through the water.
REFERENCES - EXHIBITION GUIDE
[1] Gauguin, title of painting created in Tahiti, 1897. (A new book revises his ethical reputation.) With the advent of capitalism, ‘knowledge’, ‘politics’ and ‘desire’ became ‘uncoupled from one another’. ‘What can we know? What ought we to do? What do we find attractive?’ are no longer ‘intermeshed’
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell: Oxford, 1990, p336-7
[2] An Interview with Jorie Graham, Sharon Blackie, EarthLines, 2 Aug, 2012, p36, 40.
[3] A Mexican/Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. Quoted by Suzi Gablik, ‘The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art’, New Renaissance magazine, Vol 8:1, 1998.
[4] ‘McGillivray says the key to successful longer TikToks (the duration limit on videos was recently expanded from one to three minutes) is grabbing the audience within the first six seconds and then ensuring that there is something to keep them engaged every 10 seconds.’ Hannah Reich, ‘Australian TikTok creator Mary McGillivray brings art history to a Gen Z audience’, The Art Show’ https://www abc net au/news/2021-08-22/
[5] Gregg Brill, ‘The Wonder of Wetlands: A Nature-Based Solution for Environmental Challenges’, The Pacific Institute, no date.
[6] Wetlands Disappearing Three Times Faster than Forests, UN Climate Change News, 1 October, 2018.
[7] ‘Human activities that lead to loss of wetlands include drainage and infilling for agriculture and construction, pollution, overfishing and overexploitation of resources, invasive species and climate change.’ UN World Wetlands Day, 2 February, 2025.
[8] Auntie Frances Witt, a Yurruun ga Gumbaynggirr Elder Pers comment 22 April, 2025
[9] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton UP, 2015
[10] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015, p134.
[11] See Justin McCurry, ‘‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan’, interview, The Guardian, 9 Sep, 2022
See Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, (2020) Cambridge UP, 2023.
[12] Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Paul Barclay, ‘Jeff Sparrow says we’ve been duped into believing environmental blame rests with us’, Big Ideas, ABC RN, 22 Aug, 2022.
[13] We are consuming the future. If Earth’s history is compared to a calendar year, modern human life has existed for 37 minutes and we have used one third of Earth’s natural resources in the last 0.2 seconds. ‘The World Counts • Impact through Awareness’, https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/state-of-theplanet/overuse-of-resources-on-earth Accessed 15 April, 2025
[14] Jason Hickel ‘The madness of capital: World leaders remain wedded to economic metrics that say little about the well-being of humans and the environment.’ 13 Oct, 2013. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/10/13/the-madness-of-capital
[15] David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Penguin, 2019.
[16] ‘Spring’, Walden, in The Portable Thoreau, Ed., C. Bode, Penguin, 1976, p557.
[17] Don Ihde believes, ‘Contemporary culture in its now global communications context, is increasingly embodied through its instrumentarium... image technologies.’ Don Ihde, ‘Image Technologies and Traditional Culture,’ Inquiry (Oslo), 35, 1992, p378
[18] Key to David Abram’s thesis, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, Pantheon, 1996. Allen Carlson reminds us, ‘Aesthetic appreciation [of nature] is not simply a matter of looking at objects or ‘views’ from a specific point. Rather it is being in the midst of them, moving with regard to them... also smelling, hearing, touching and feeling ’ Allen Carlson, ‘Formal Qualities in the Natural Environment’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 13, 1979, p107.
[19] Sianne Ngai, ‘Merely Interesting’, Critical Inquiry 34:4, 2008.
[20] See Jorie Graham above Lawrence Buell argues that Aldo Leopold (a pioneer of wildlife ecology and modern conservation) used a strategy to ‘create a symbiosis of art and polemic’ that encouraged the audience to be ‘more receptive to environmental advocacy ’ Lawrence Buell, ‘American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised’, American Literary History, 1:1, 1989, p11.
[21] Val Plumwood, Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason, Routledge, 2002
[22] Pallavi Smart, ‘Pandemic shocker: Kids know brands, but not animals’ 25.9.2021. https://www.msn.com/
[23] Patricia Mathews, ‘Aesthetic Appreciation of Art and Nature’, British Journal of Aesthetics, V41:4, Oct, 2001. She concludes, ‘the appreciation of nature is no less rich or complex than that of art.’ p410.
[24] Robert R. Dunn et al. ‘The pigeon paradox: dependence of global conservation on urban nature’, Conservation biology 20: 6, 2006.
[25] David Attenborough in the documentary series, Life On Earth, BBC, 1979.
[26] See Andy Dobson, Green Political Thought, Milton Park, Routledge, 2007, p3
[27] Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, U of Chicago P, 2001, p17 Shiner’s argument can inform the importance of an everyday aesthetics, where even the mundane can be the focus of aesthetic sensibility and judgment.
[28] Its use is expanding rapidly in music videos, no need for a production crew or big budget. The edits can be more, or seem to be more, than one a second at an extreme pace. I’m thinking of one I have just watched. Director Andrew Thomas Huang worked on Yaeji’s 'Pondeggi' (2025) with Microsoft as part of the Artifacts: New Experiments in Art & AI initiative for commissioned projects ‘This groundbreaking project explores cultural memory and transformation through AI-driven innovation, showcasing how AI can expand creative possibilities while preserving human artistry ’ Rob Ulitski - 20th Mar 2025 https://www.promonews.tv/videos/2025/03/19/yaeji-pondeggi-andrewthomas-huang/90418
[29] Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, Trans , Erik Butler, MIT, 2017. And AI is worryingly persuasive. AI was between three and six times more persuasive than humans were on an online forum. Chris Stokel-Walker, ‘How an embarrassing U-turn exposed a concerning truth about ChatGPT’, Guardian, 1 May, 2025.
[30] Ursula K. Le Guin, Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 2014 [31] An Interview with Jorie Graham, Sharon Blackie, EarthLines 2, Aug 2012, p36, 40.
[32] The poet Ted Hughes read Rachel Carson's ‘Silent Spring’ when first published in 1962 and was deeply influenced. Seven years later, Hughes and friends launched ‘Your Environment’, Britain’s first environmental magazine In the 1980s, he was writing elegies for species on extinction’s verge. He became heavily involved in green issues, particularly river health. He read up on the literature, lobbied politicians, became a patron of wildlife charities and sat on a committee for the National Rivers Authority Yvonne Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
[33] Gary Snyder, ‘Writers and the War Against Nature’, Resurgence & Ecologist, Issue 239, Nov/Dec 2006. In Jeffrey Bilbro, ‘Helping People Love the World: An Interview with Gary Snyder’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011, p439.
Cover image: John Bennett, Yurruun.ga dawning, 2025 (detail). Image courtesy of the artist.
The City of Coffs Harbour acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gumbaynggirr people, who have cared for this land since time immemorial We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and commit ourselves to a future with reconciliation and renewal at its heart.
