Fragile Earth: Extinction

Fragile Earth: Extinction is the first in a series of biannual exhibitions planned at Gippsland Art Gallery, each exploring different aspects of our changing climate and its effects on human, animal, and plant life. With some one hundred artists participating from across and beyond the Gippsland region, the show explores an array of perspectives on environmental loss – both historical and future.

Curators Louisa Waters and Melanie Caple have chosen “extinction” as the theme for this inaugural iteration of Fragile Earth in response to the particular concerns of local artists. Especially, they are responding to the actions taken by a group of Gippsland-based artists led by Dawn Stubbs, who have made and exhibited art under the collective name CARE: Concerned Artists Resisting Extinction. Stubbs’s and her collaborators’ work began in 2019, following the release of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It continued throughout 2020 and 2021 – despite Covid-induced disruptions to their plans –  when the group exhibited a series of simultaneous projects throughout the Gippsland region calling attention to species loss and imminent extinction at the hand of various factors. These included not only 6000-kilometre fire front of 2019-2020 which had destroyed habitats along the eastern seaboard, but ongoing practices of (State-sanctioned) deforestation and pollution in Gippsland’s old-growth native forests.

Fragile Earth: Extinction opens up timely questions about the role of art and artists in an environmental crisis. As Waters and Caple rightly observe, “our current environmental crisis is, as much as anything else, a crisis of communication,” and artists might take a range of positions as messengers, meaning-makers, activists, and interpreters during this uniquely pressurised period in human history. Art is not entirely the same as activism, protest, or sloganeering after all, though it may share some aims with these other forms of expression.

Many artists, including Rosalind Crisp with Omeo Dance and Lisa Robertson, call attention to under-examined or under-publicised events: species loss, loss of habitat, and corporate destruction of finely-balanced ecosystems. Others, like Lee Darroch, share the connections to and knowledge of the land held by local First Nations communities. A number of works in the show – including the contributions of Matthew Dunne, Susan Fraser, Michelle Molinari, and Wendy Habraken-Flack – reflect on what has already escaped us. They carefully, tenderly, and often movingly picture the imaginative and physical traces left by animals already gone: we see finely-drawn corpses, bones, preserved animal bodies in glass jars, and hands reaching out to touch species already long extinct.

Across this range of work, the imaginative possibilities of visual art are brought to bear on “scientific fact.” Speculation, reflection, feeling, and even revelation animate the bare data of our situation, both within the region and across Australia, and the planet. Articulating the ecological and emotional complexities of the Anthropocene, and animating our human place at the centre of current climatological events, this exhibition is elegiac, but also energising.  

EXHIBITION 
Fragile Earth: Extinction
11 June – 28 August 2022
Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria