Exhibition review: Carbon_Dating, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Sunshine Coast 

Carbon_Dating is a touring group exhibition that features the works of 15 artists of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds. Drawing on environmental dynamics, it surveys Australian native grasses and the ways in which they inform connections to the self, others and to the country.

At the entrance to the gallery, you are greeted by The Native Fence (2023) of Delissa Walker Ngadijina, a Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver based in Cairns, Far North Queensland. It is a woven wall sculpture that uses the last surviving native grass strands from her growing mound. Separated and introduced individually, the strands tell of Indigenous resistance and survival. But the modernist abstract grid forged by them has more ambivalent connotations. Its repetitive rectangles of negative space – the ‘reverse’ of the sculpture – evoke Australia’s violent colonial past, unseen Indigenous histories and concealed truths. 

Across the room, Andrea Higgins’s Grass and Glass Series (2022), directs attention along its vast representations of grass flower formations. In a slow-reacting process, delicate and fragile pressed specimens of barbed wire, native wheat grass and silky blue, left imprints to the photographic surface of paper, almost as memories of themselves. Searching for methods to sustain and expand the figurations of grass flowers, Higgins enlarged the photograms. The images carry a greater sense of presence, underlying the resilience and multiple functions of these humble plants. 

The power of the indexical trace of native grasses is also examined by Mia Hacker and Kilagi Nielsen’s works on paper, Melissa Stannard’s fabric cyanotypes and Liz Capelin’s ceramic vessels. This group of artists oversaw the native grass mound at Tuan Environmental Reserve, south-east Queensland. Their meaningful dialogues with nature and each other are captured by Sasha Parlett in her lyrical digital work Carbon Dating; Sunshine Coast (2023). Jason Murphy and Pipier Weller’s Grass Care Package (2023) fuses cyanotype and ready-made aesthetics. The artwork – a limited series of tote bags and postcards – is available for both exhibition and sale, extending the conversations beyond the gallery and into the everyday. 

POV (point of view) (2023) is Hilary Coulter’s installation. It consists of six embroidery hoops magnetically mounted on wooden board. Each ring protects small native grasses hand-stitched on tulle. Viewers are invited to physically interact with the works and rearrange their sequence. In other words, they are encouraged to actively choose their perspective. POV (point of view) is an investigation of inattentional blindness and the tendencies to overlook quotidian, local landscapes. Indicators of the lived time, stitches call for active seeing as exploration, manipulation and construction of objects. 

The idea that seeing is a creative act is the theoretical concept that lies at the core of this exhibition. Through the use of extreme close-ups, artist and academic Keith Armstrong dislodges forms of being of native grasses that are outside of our range of vision. The video Grassland Community of Care/(More Than Human Persons) (2023) advances atmospheric observations of blooming or preserved grasses in their interactions with elements of nature and insects. Shimmering flowers, sensory grass seed heads and intricate webs of pearlescent stems are unbounded to the eye.  

The projection contextualises Armstrong’s personal experience of growing grass from seeds. Spanning four years, his initiative continues to develop and involve other artists and scientists. The Personal Interweaver (2022), an interactive device/sculpture fabricated by artist Donna Davis, facilitates the sharing of creative knowledge and practice. It also includes a series of card provocations written by artist Daniele Constance that guide participants in their reflections. Each artwork displayed by the Carbon_ Dating exhibition revolves around and proceeds through this caring for grass motivation.

With the three-channel video work Interwoven (2023-2024), Davis opens up a meditative space. Magnified images of ‘stomata’ – or pores of grass leaves that permit gas exchange – and of human lungs are interposed. It is an artistic choice that punctuates the dimension of interspecies connections. Through their acts of breathing, humans and plants continue the living experience of each other. Luke Lickfold’s ambient soundtrack complements the imagery.

The major installation of Merinda Davies, Sewing the Seeds (2023), closes the exhibition. Multiple mediums and strategies, such as moving image, photography, non-reproducible artefacts and movement, convey imagined narratives of grasslands revival. The performative action to camera presents the artist spreading native grass seeds across abandoned sites of extraction. Bare and exposed, stripped away of vegetation and life, the land warns against mining’s devastating consequences. Of ritual-like quality, Davies’ movements prioritise the new roles of seed carrier and spreader and their integration to daily routines. 

Sewing the Seeds challenges traditional perceptions of body art and earthworks. Tightly cropped, images (film and photographs) accent the artist’s simple and commanding gestures. Not driven by the customary desire to commune with nature, but rather by environmental consciousness, the artist aims to heal the colonised, consumed and depleted earth. In the complex temporality of the installation, grasslands restoration becomes future memory. The actual or imagined rejuvenation of ecosystems, with its intimations of continuance, communicates active hope and participation. Sewing the Seeds retrieves, absorbs and represents the possibilities of alternative temporal emphases. 

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One wide-scaled photograph centres on the artist’s body against minimal, adverse settings with no horizon. The usual sense of restriction and constriction is disallowed by the pose that Davies adopts. With light yellow and golden hues, the handmade garment visually contrasts its surroundings. The artist’s body seems to invulnerably emerge from the inhospitable rocks, occupying the focal point. It is an act that suggests individuation, positive and powerful creativity and force. The restrained colours and textures of the backdrop further enhance the body’s radiance, bringing them to the fore as change agent.

Humans become catalysts and facilitators of environmental action in a message that reverberates throughout the Carbon_Dating exhibition. 

Carbon_Dating is curated by Beth Jackson and Jo-Anne Driessens and will be exhibited at Caloundra Regional Gallery on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland until 8 December 2024. 

In 2025, Carbon_Dating will tour the state and be exhibited at Tablelands Regional Gallery, Atherton (17 January – 25 February 2025), Qantas Founders Museum, Longreach (15 March – 15 June 2025) and Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, Bundaberg (18 July – 7 September 2025).