Resolution vs Revolution
Extinction Tourism: Walking the Glaciers
This week I picked up my artworks from the framers. I walked into the shop and saw my big piece Extinction Tourism: Walking the Glaciers waiting for me to collect. I was gobsmacked. There it was, in the frame looking luscious. A worked conceived of grief for our planet yet looking sublimely beautiful.
I think about these things when I am preparing for an exhibition. The works have a strong message – of injustice or climate change or social breakdown, yet I want them to look aesthetically beautiful, enticing and resolved. How to do this without diluting the content?
It’s a question people ask me about embedding a message into their artwork. As one artist said to me “I didn’t even know what question to ask in order to find the answer to what I could make my work about.”
Teasing out those threads of connection is a process – as you make the work, the message of your why comes through. I often use stitching in my works to represent order vs chaos, our human footprints in their orderly lines with all the threads hanging, splayed and in a tangle.
As I made the work for my exhibition Fire & Ice, I knew I wanted to capture the essence of what I’d experienced when I was at my artist residency at Nes in Skagaströnd, Iceland last year. I started by embedding pieces of rope I had found into my handmade paper and added mono prints of stones from the black lava beach. These looked like chunky glaciers, broken off and blackened by volcanic ash.
I had a niggling feeling that I was making work about the fragility of the planet and our ecological footprint, bearing witness to the melting glaciers. Yet when I was in Iceland I actually participated in a glacier walk, which meant I was part of the problem – it’s an uncomfortable feeling. And so the title was born – Extinction Tourism: Walking the Glaciers.
In the 1960s a cultural and social revolution erupted led by students, musicians, artists and creatives from all areas. The Fluxus movement staged ‘happenings’, a series of experimental art performances which advocated process rather than the end result. People like Yoko Ono took part in these events which became the forerunner for performance and video art.
In the spirit of this revolution, I will be holding a Peace Happening to coincide with the annual lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower on Viday Island, near Reykjavik on 9 October which I attended last year. This inspiring project was devised by Yoko Ono as a tribute to her husband John Lennon. In Murwillumbah we will sing john Lennon’s Imagine and I believe our voices will put that energy of peace into our small northern NSW town.
Tomorrow, 21 September is International Day of Peace celebrated around the world for humanity to commit to Peace and build a culture of Peace. I’m hoping that my small Iceland inspired happening will contribute to this culture and bring about a peaceful revolution/resolution if not in the world, then within ourselves.
