Seeing unstoppable loss through brick walls
Sounding out the role of art in responding to climate change
Visual artist Kelly Hartland has one of those voices that draws you in… a voice like a well - full of stillness, depth and darkness. Her work, ‘Seeing through brick walls’ challenges us to ask if we have the insight to save ourselves.
I recorded Kelly in a crazy day of ten back-to-back interviews with regional artists. All had created work for an exhibition called ‘Climate resilience is…’ - a collection of nineteen works responding to the brief of adapting to the escalating impacts of climate change. The exhibition opened at Bendigo’s Conflux media industries conference in September 2022 - where I also gave a talk about sound and climate - on the challenges of engaging with climate as a creative media maker and the interesting stuff soundworkers are doing in this space.
WATCH an excerpt from ‘Climate resilience is… an art exhibition’:
Not all works in the ‘Climate resilience is…’ exhibition seemed to be ready to ‘adapt’ to our evolving conditions - many appeared caught in the headlights of realising the magnitude of the problem - like Chris Duffy’s pop art piece - ‘A muffled scream’ depicting a woman screaming through a covid mask - and Lauren Starr’s digital photograph ‘Out of time’ showing a stately Bendigo building submerged in the rising sea.
It reminded me that we are all in different places with climate change and that it’s easy to get lost in your own bubble of assumptions - and that media/art/literature experiences can play a role in providing a space for working through this stuff.
“How do you make work about living with unstoppable loss”
While researching my talk at Conflux I came across author James Bradley’s keynote lecture - ‘Wicked Problems and Speculative Futures: writing the Anthropocene’ for the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing symposium - which is, in part, a reflection on writing his most recent book ‘Ghost Species’.
It is a good lecture and I recommend it. It is a relief when someone on a podium speaks directly on climate - that we are living with this “vanishing yet already existing future” and the open recognition that “unspeakable loss is unstoppable”. These words make me feel less marginal.
In his lecture, (spoiler alert) Bradley asks what is the role of fiction in this space - I think his response is relevant to the arts more generally - that it’s in part “to give shape to things that are difficult to express in words”.
But how do you do that? Amongst all the awkwardness of giving shape to something even as it is shaping us… how to critique the hero narrative, for example, using the well honed knife that cleaved the hero from his rock in the first place… Bradley suggests an approach that explores new forms for works and different methods and contexts for making…
As dealing with the impacts climate is unescapable, Bradley offers a role for creative writing (in addition to the more well known parts of ‘activating’ audiences and giving voice to those less heard) - to the idea that we are bearing witness to the loss and the moment we are in… solace gleaned from something recognised and knowing we are not alone with this….
There is lots of great stuff in this lecture - and it helped inspire and ground my thinking as I started collecting materials for my own talk.
I found it particularly refreshing when Bradley noted that climate engaged creative work is often burdened by the expectation that it has to do some kind of ‘job’ - administer a solution to the problems it gives shape to - Bradly refers to this as an uneasy kind of “instrumentalising” of creative work and that similar expectations are not imposed on creatives working in other genres - writers on crime or relationships are not expected to fix the problems they unearth.
Bradley’s final point is to suggest that a positive contribution that climate engaged creative work can make is to chip away at “a decolonisation of the [imagination] of West” … to unearth the deep narrative tropes that underpin the geopolitical dominance of the west - and its’ core values of extraction, exploitation and human exceptionalism.
LISTEN to an excerpt that expands on this idea from James Bradley’s lecture
I love the point that he makes in this clip - I wonder what would happen if we really did get rid of the lawn mower applied so frequently and vigorously to our imaginations - and let the clipped grass turn into meadows - humming with life and possibility…
Bradley’s lecture was my first stop on a bit of a journey in search of ideas relevant to creative soundwork that explore the inner story of climate - in the next post I look forward to sharing a thoughtful, locally produced, locational audio piece I found that moves beyond ‘telling the story differently’ - to remembering how it’s always been told.
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