“There are many things in life that require us to traverse delicately,” says curator Tina Wilson. “Whether it be social interactions, personal interactions or interactions with land and environment, we need to be constantly mindful of our actions now because of the lasting effects they can have in the future.”
Using this idea as a springboard for an exhibition of works drawn from the Tweed Regional Gallery collection, Wilson looks at our relationship with the environment through the lens of contemporary art. Bringing together work by Michael Cook, Rew Hanks, Penny Evans, Michael Kempson, Vernon Ah Kee and Victoria Reichelt, Wilson has positioned a large linocut panel by the Dhuwa artists of the Northern Territory at the exhibition entry, setting up a strong and immediate connection to the environment.
“This work illustrates how Aboriginal people lived in harmony with the land’s delicate ecosystems and responded to the natural flow of seasons,” Wilson explains. “As the exhibition continues, the works explore the devasting impact colonisation had on Aboriginal people and the environment—through introduced flora and fauna—and in particular, how this trauma continues for both Aboriginal people and the environment today.”
Further illustrating this is Judy Watson’s the holes in the land #1-6, 2015, a series of prints based on images of culturally significant objects and architectural drawings of the British Museum. Highlighting the removal of objects from their place on Country to institutions and archives far from their origin, Watson’s images are filled with a keen sense of loss, not only of the objects removed but of traditional culture. As Wilson says, “The exhibition acts as a reminder that even the most robust of environments and people of utmost resilience have a breaking point, and we are responsible for how we traverse these delicate terrains every day. Living gently, living kindly and living with respect will take us a long way into a better future.”
A Delicate Terrain
Tweed Regional Gallery
On now—26 January 2025
This article was originally published in the September/October 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Suggested Reading
The rhythm of creating
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Sally Gearon
The ecstatic visions of Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
Michael Sun
Scaling new heights
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Michelle Wang
Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When finally makes sense of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank. It is worth the plane flight.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.
Joanna Mendelssohn
Inside Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio
Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
Michelle Wang
Julie Gough on history’s many afterlives
In GHOSTLAND, her new exhibition at the ANU Art & Design Gallery, Julie Gough continues her lifelong inquiry into gaps and silences—while conjuring the apparitions that haunt Tasmania’s colonial past.