Catchments Project
by Emma Mayall, curator National Gallery of Victoria.
From what fount is the sea replenished by its native springs and the streams that flow into it from afar? - Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe[1]
Water is a substance that is, even now, all too often taken for granted in the developed world. Despite our increasing awareness of its preciousness....read more
by Guy Abrahams, CEO and Co-founder CLIMARTE: Arts for a Safe Climate
In The Politics of Perception, artists Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett examine how different people at different times have perceived or failed to perceive the true impact of environmental degradation and its underlying causes. People often treat economics and ecology as structures of similar value and immutability....read more
Making Sense: from the Sublime to the Meticulous
by John Gregory
It’s hard to imagine a more opportune moment for ‘making sense’ of environmental issues, which clearly present us all – scientists and non-scientists alike – with a huge challenge. In this regard, Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett’s works bridge a crucial gap, presenting complex, disturbing data in lucid, evocative, even surprisingly beautiful form....read more
The Remarkable Beauty in Disaster
by Dr Kit Wise, Senior Lecturer Fine Art, Dean of Education Monash University
In introducing this remarkable exhibition by Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett, I am reminded of a critical issue for environmental art as identified by the Gruen Transfer: the problem of the polar bear.
I am delighted that we have two of Monash University’s finest researchers in the Fine Arts addressing this problem, in Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett. They have developed their practices in relation to an international network of pre-eminent scientists — including NASA, Cambridge University, Monash Astrophysics and the Swiss-based IUCN Red List of Threatened Species....read more
by Miriam McGarry
On arriving at the casting studio I was bundled into the threatened studio space, and welcomed into a team of volunteers. We stood in a row; jeweler, musician, sculptor and I - slowly dipping and spinning the green leaves into the porcelain slip. Little by little, we filled our sheets of newspaper with embalmed plants, gently massaging the porcelain coating where it had not clung to the waxy leaves.
Jasmine Targett’s white geraniums are compellingly tactile, and serenely beautiful. However, in addition to their elegance, the crisp porcelain leaves are persuasive and political....read more
Collaboration, Continuity and Community
by Alicia Renew, Curator - Monash University Museum of Art
The Crumbling Ecologies Project addresses the key issues surrounding the closure of media-specific studios across Victoria and asks us to consider why these studios are disappearing from the education system. The project openly questions which forms of artistic practice can be considered as contemporary, and which are now considered irrelevant, while identifying the obsolete notion of the artist existing within a singular medium. Since the rise of Conceptualism in the 1960s, the art world has recognised the dominance of the multidisciplinary artist, designer and architect whose creative practice relies on accessibility to various media-specific studios. Yet, art schools have continued to perceive traditional studio practice outside of the freer forms as rigid classicism with dictatorial notions at play....read more
Media Specific
by Alicia Renew, Curator - Monash University Museum of Art
Initiating dialogue that surrounds contemporary art practice in relation to glass studio practice, Media Specific establishes a bond between traditional decorative arts and contemporary art practice. The selected artists work within the tradition of glass making, while utilising the medium when appropriate in order to communicate concepts and to visualise research.
Embodying the diversity represented by glass practitioners, Media Specific focuses on the relationships and differences between contemporary and traditional concepts of glass media. Raising the question, is media specific practice abstracted into craft, because it is created with particular media and tradition?....read more
Bound Futures and Existential Anxiety
Vision Quest: Into Nature, Catalogue Essay, Incinerator Gallery 2015
In the changing world, responses to environmental challenges have become mixed and varied. Key themes, or rather ‘tags’ are now inextricably liked to nature that include - under threat, endangered, in crisis and disaster. These imbue a sense of uncertainty, provoking a narrative within visual culture on aesthetics and emergency....read more
by Dr David Sequeira, Director Latrobe Regional Gallery
The works presented in The Politics of Perception demonstrate more just environmental theory. The works in this exhibition are of ‘our time’, grounded in personal concerns about global warming and endangered species. Now more than ever, environmental concerns are an intimate aspect of mainstream consciousness....read more
by Assoc. Professor Linda Williams, RMIT
There are several well-known types of imagery recurring in the public arena that are now icons of climate change, and photos or film of massive slabs of melting ice in the polar regions have become one of these key indices of escalating global environmental change. In this exhibition, the Australian artists Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett focus on Antarctica in ways that extend and reconfigure these iconic images....read more
No Part is Immune From the Changes of its Counterparts
by Antoanetta Ivanova, Curator - Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (MOCA)
In the Australian Aborigines Dreamtime there is a common mythological story about a serpent of enormous proportions with powers so great that it can replenish the creeks and rivers of the land. As it slithers across Country, the Rainbow Serpent[1]forms deep channels and gullies, collecting and distributing water, creating not just the rivers and mountains of the landscape but the flow of life itself. But if disturbed, this giant can be unforgiving, causing irreversible destruction....read more
The Crumbling Ecologies Project
by Debbie Pryor, Curator - Craft
Across the nation art schools are re-evaluating the need and demand for crafts such ceramics, glass, woodworking and jewellery. Such courses are experiencing restructuring, merging and fatal closures; the dilution of teaching pure craft techniques at a tertiary level will have a profound effect on the visual art, craft and design communities. Melbourne based artist Jasmine Targett began her project by tackling the Monash Caulfield campus' craft restructure and in doing so discovered a national community supporting her concerns....read more
by Grace Cochrane, Senior Curator - Powerhouse Museum Sydney.
Ecology – that’s a word we usually associate with the well-being of an environment, specifically a natural environment. We tend to think of ecologies as things that are precious, worth defending, and worth nurturing because we know that their well-being and continuation is to our benefit and, in a world worrying about the effects of climate change, worth nurturing to the benefit of the future of the planet....read more
New Perspectives in environmental Art: Us and Them – Umwelten
by Assoc. Professor Linda Williams, RMIT
The concept of umwelten, is a term derived from the work of the early 20th Century biologist and ethologist Jakob von Uexküll. In the German umwelt means ‘surrounding world’, or ‘self-centred world’ and for von Uexküll, umwelten conveyed the idea of the vast range of creatures occupying worlds whose meaning could be understood from their specific point of perspective. Within myriad umwelten then, diverse creatures experience their umwelt differently, yet von Uexküll’s findings led him to conclude that communication, or semiosis, was a process of interaction common to the umwelten of all organisms: whether human or non-human. The study of these processes of communication formed the basis of biosemiotics, of which perhaps one of the best-known studies is the ‘information dance’ of bees....read more
