+ Tomorrow never dies, Linden New Art, May - July 2015
Jason Baerg, Atticus Bastow, Elisa Jane Carmichael, Rebecca Mayo, Jack Rowland, Andrew Tetzlaff.
Curated by Adriane and Verity Hayward.
Catalogue Essay:
Tomorrow never dies. We trust it will always be there... the sun will always be shining when we draw the curtains each morning. An all too familiar belief – it’s happened every day so far – so why wouldn’t it tomorrow? But if we knew the world might end tomorrow would we change how we act, speak, think – would we change how we treat our earth?
There is a kind of otherworldly union that exists with the ground we stand on – this exists autonomously – it doesn’t require subscription to any kind of spiritual belief. From this land that grows us comes an unwavering connection. Each day air is breathed, toes squish in grass, the sky fills with blue, water abounds, morning dew arouses our senses – it’s a nice day, we think. What would it be like if there was only one day of blue left? The world that is ours, home, place… The Jacaranda trees, the big wide sky, wriggling earthworms, mulberry leaves, the summer song of cicadas, the shrill call of a whistling kite. Or the single drop of rain that hangs from a newly turned autumn leaf. These are the things we want to remember…
Within this issue, it is significant to consider how the first people of this country feel this earth in ways that are different to others. The relationship is one with multiple dimensions...historical, mythological, practical. But ultimately is it the land that owns them, and each aspect of their lives are connected to that – an intrinsic responsibility to care for country. The landscape is a second skin, a relationship that cuts both ways…to see its wonders but also to see its ruin.
Each artist presented here endeavours to show you something new and revealing about their place, that which connects them to the earth – and the personal and cultural narratives that colour their relationship to the land. These artists explore constructive and innovative visual approaches to the urban and natural environment, by exploring personal connections with place. The responses are both local and global, cultivated from diverse places and peoples. The hope is that these ideas can demonstrate the urgent need for initiative, forethought, response.
For now, the sun will come up tomorrow. Remember the delicate symbiosis between our earth and our existence….and, act. If not for others, do it for your place, the earth beneath your feet. Let it grow and be there tomorrow. It’s yours after all.
Adriane & Verity Hayward, 2015
Artist Statements:
Atticus Bastow
‘Location Study No. 6’ is a durational site investigation of the interaction between the St Kilda foreshore and Port Phillip Bay. Encompassing roughly 25 cubic kilometers in volume, the bay is a marker of permanence and constancy to Melbourne. Yet the influence of tide, weather, atmospheric pollution, industry, and recreation all affect and influence changeability within both the character and quality of the bay. Employing water samples, field recordings, text, and non-physical data, the presence and disposition of Port Phillip Bay will be documented across a 31 day period from the perspective of the St Kilda foreshore, subsequently presented in stark detail for critical sensory examination.
Jason Baerg
In Art in the Age of Asymmetry, Timothy Morton argues, “that we have entered a new era of aesthetics, shaped by the current ecological emergency.” The New Pangea is an abstract body of work that considers a disconnected rapport to the environment as a result of our misdirected desire. The Sky, Animals and Land are processed through technology and are translated as flesh, fauna and playful apparatus. Imbedded in the process are intentions to activate resolutions to the encumbering calamity at hand.
Rebecca Mayo
The walk from my home in Preston to Acland St, via the Moonee Ponds Creek, is 22km. Walking between the two locations I observe the lie of the land, looking for remnant or restored plant communities. I try to conjure the wetlands and swamps that once stretched around the bay, teeming with life, in my imagination.
Walking, while re-imagining this place, provides a temporal space in which to contemplate and collect. At Linden I am presenting accessories to my walks, crafted from fabric dyed with weeds and indigenous plants and augmented with rubbish picked up as I walk. The textiles echo my footfall and perhaps reveal traces of the extended history of this passage.
Elisa Jane Carmichael
The work I have produced for Tomorrow Never Dies is a body work I have developed in the hope of creating a sense of environment awareness for the waste pollution that is entering our seas. Fishing net a float is the oceans surface created using acrylic on canvas. Over the top of the canvas I have weaved a fine, delicate fishing net washing over the sea. This fishing net demonstrates a fine, delicate, small piece of waste, something humans may think might disintegrate into the sea. No. It does not. Everyone tiny bit of waste that enters the sea swims around with our marine life. Sometimes it washes ashore after days, months or years. Other times it sinks to the depths of the sea or takes the lives of innocent sea life. Garden under the Sea is a collection of coral sculptures created using found ropes which have been floating in the Quandamooka seas. They have washed ashore on North Stradbroke Island. The plastic ropes have been weaved into clay to create an under water sea bed of coral to encourage an awareness of the plastic pollutions that are inflicting life and the world under the sea.
Andrew Tetzlaff
I'm interested in moments when images interact with and are reciprocally informed by the outside world. Using photography as a condensation of time, light and space I explore the physicality of the printed surface—pushing, pulling and twisting it in an effort to generate a dialogue with the reality surrounding it. Aspects of representation and material alike are accelerated or delayed through this interaction, and the junctures between them—where print meets object—become sites for exchange: places where gravity, direction and scale are loosened and subject to negotiation. Through its simple materials and lightness of touch the work doesn't so much provoke reaction as it promotes curiosity, investigation and reflection of our experience—of place, time, speed and of the real.
Jack Rowland
Jack Rowland’s high-chromatic, ‘unnatural’ landscapes challenge the way we perceive our surroundings and compel a re-evaluation of our relationship to the natural environment.
Engaging with the notion of altered perception, Rowland transforms a familiar earthly environment into an otherworldly landscape. The artificial colour-schemes applied through a realist manner of painting characterizes Rowland’s work which oscillates between the real and the imaginary. Having no figures in his depicted environment, Rowland invites us to envision ourselves within his surreal landscapes that may be a post-apocalyptic, alien or psychological space.
Rowland’s depicted environment evokes ambivalence about the natural world. The saturated colours may be a celebration of the natural world or it may be seen as a sinister vision of our planet’s future. His paintings bring our attention to the environmental deterioration but simultaneously allude to the hopeful idea of nature as a life force; even without inhabitants it continues to exist.
Tomorrow never dies. We trust it will always be there... the sun will always be shining when we draw the curtains each morning. An all too familiar belief – it’s happened every day so far – so why wouldn’t it tomorrow? But if we knew the world might end tomorrow would we change how we act, speak, think – would we change how we treat our earth?
There is a kind of otherworldly union that exists with the ground we stand on – this exists autonomously – it doesn’t require subscription to any kind of spiritual belief. From this land that grows us comes an unwavering connection. Each day air is breathed, toes squish in grass, the sky fills with blue, water abounds, morning dew arouses our senses – it’s a nice day, we think. What would it be like if there was only one day of blue left? The world that is ours, home, place… The Jacaranda trees, the big wide sky, wriggling earthworms, mulberry leaves, the summer song of cicadas, the shrill call of a whistling kite. Or the single drop of rain that hangs from a newly turned autumn leaf. These are the things we want to remember…
Within this issue, it is significant to consider how the first people of this country feel this earth in ways that are different to others. The relationship is one with multiple dimensions...historical, mythological, practical. But ultimately is it the land that owns them, and each aspect of their lives are connected to that – an intrinsic responsibility to care for country. The landscape is a second skin, a relationship that cuts both ways…to see its wonders but also to see its ruin.
Each artist presented here endeavours to show you something new and revealing about their place, that which connects them to the earth – and the personal and cultural narratives that colour their relationship to the land. These artists explore constructive and innovative visual approaches to the urban and natural environment, by exploring personal connections with place. The responses are both local and global, cultivated from diverse places and peoples. The hope is that these ideas can demonstrate the urgent need for initiative, forethought, response.
For now, the sun will come up tomorrow. Remember the delicate symbiosis between our earth and our existence….and, act. If not for others, do it for your place, the earth beneath your feet. Let it grow and be there tomorrow. It’s yours after all.
Adriane & Verity Hayward, 2015
Artist Statements:
Atticus Bastow
‘Location Study No. 6’ is a durational site investigation of the interaction between the St Kilda foreshore and Port Phillip Bay. Encompassing roughly 25 cubic kilometers in volume, the bay is a marker of permanence and constancy to Melbourne. Yet the influence of tide, weather, atmospheric pollution, industry, and recreation all affect and influence changeability within both the character and quality of the bay. Employing water samples, field recordings, text, and non-physical data, the presence and disposition of Port Phillip Bay will be documented across a 31 day period from the perspective of the St Kilda foreshore, subsequently presented in stark detail for critical sensory examination.
Jason Baerg
In Art in the Age of Asymmetry, Timothy Morton argues, “that we have entered a new era of aesthetics, shaped by the current ecological emergency.” The New Pangea is an abstract body of work that considers a disconnected rapport to the environment as a result of our misdirected desire. The Sky, Animals and Land are processed through technology and are translated as flesh, fauna and playful apparatus. Imbedded in the process are intentions to activate resolutions to the encumbering calamity at hand.
Rebecca Mayo
The walk from my home in Preston to Acland St, via the Moonee Ponds Creek, is 22km. Walking between the two locations I observe the lie of the land, looking for remnant or restored plant communities. I try to conjure the wetlands and swamps that once stretched around the bay, teeming with life, in my imagination.
Walking, while re-imagining this place, provides a temporal space in which to contemplate and collect. At Linden I am presenting accessories to my walks, crafted from fabric dyed with weeds and indigenous plants and augmented with rubbish picked up as I walk. The textiles echo my footfall and perhaps reveal traces of the extended history of this passage.
Elisa Jane Carmichael
The work I have produced for Tomorrow Never Dies is a body work I have developed in the hope of creating a sense of environment awareness for the waste pollution that is entering our seas. Fishing net a float is the oceans surface created using acrylic on canvas. Over the top of the canvas I have weaved a fine, delicate fishing net washing over the sea. This fishing net demonstrates a fine, delicate, small piece of waste, something humans may think might disintegrate into the sea. No. It does not. Everyone tiny bit of waste that enters the sea swims around with our marine life. Sometimes it washes ashore after days, months or years. Other times it sinks to the depths of the sea or takes the lives of innocent sea life. Garden under the Sea is a collection of coral sculptures created using found ropes which have been floating in the Quandamooka seas. They have washed ashore on North Stradbroke Island. The plastic ropes have been weaved into clay to create an under water sea bed of coral to encourage an awareness of the plastic pollutions that are inflicting life and the world under the sea.
Andrew Tetzlaff
I'm interested in moments when images interact with and are reciprocally informed by the outside world. Using photography as a condensation of time, light and space I explore the physicality of the printed surface—pushing, pulling and twisting it in an effort to generate a dialogue with the reality surrounding it. Aspects of representation and material alike are accelerated or delayed through this interaction, and the junctures between them—where print meets object—become sites for exchange: places where gravity, direction and scale are loosened and subject to negotiation. Through its simple materials and lightness of touch the work doesn't so much provoke reaction as it promotes curiosity, investigation and reflection of our experience—of place, time, speed and of the real.
Jack Rowland
Jack Rowland’s high-chromatic, ‘unnatural’ landscapes challenge the way we perceive our surroundings and compel a re-evaluation of our relationship to the natural environment.
Engaging with the notion of altered perception, Rowland transforms a familiar earthly environment into an otherworldly landscape. The artificial colour-schemes applied through a realist manner of painting characterizes Rowland’s work which oscillates between the real and the imaginary. Having no figures in his depicted environment, Rowland invites us to envision ourselves within his surreal landscapes that may be a post-apocalyptic, alien or psychological space.
Rowland’s depicted environment evokes ambivalence about the natural world. The saturated colours may be a celebration of the natural world or it may be seen as a sinister vision of our planet’s future. His paintings bring our attention to the environmental deterioration but simultaneously allude to the hopeful idea of nature as a life force; even without inhabitants it continues to exist.
