The title of this exhibition Rise and Fall is an abridged version of the title of a poem (Tides Rise and Mermaids Fall) that Karla Dickens wrote in the wake of the 2022 Lismore Floods on Bundjalung Country.
Most will recognise Dickens as the ecocultural warrior that artist Blak Douglas painted in his Archibald-winning portrait, ankle deep in water carrying leaking buckets and with a determined – almost harrowing – engagement locking eyes with the viewer.
Across her career, Dickens’ work has carried an environmental concern, but as she describes in the exhibition’s catalogue: “I have had self-doubt and a fear of judgement that these issues were for hippies and not the art world.”
She continues: “The heartbreak of the Lismore floods made me seriously question whether art was simply self-indulgent and if it had any relevance in the realm of climate action.”
This exhibition is testament that art can have a powerful voice, and Dickens has the ability to connect those stories, on so many levels.
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, this exhibition’s success is testament to the close collaborative working relationship with the artist. While Cunningham is now director of Wollongong Art Gallery – where the exhibition is on show – the idea for the project came just months after the floods and walking the streets in the aftermath together.
The exhibition pairs both wall-based and free-standing sculptures with large photographic canvas banners – that sit in the space like billboards. They are tethered down with ropes and sandbags.
Dickens has built her oeuvre off the back of the trash of others, fossicked in reverse garbage stores for objects, that take on a new life laden with charged meaning. This exhibition is no exception.
These large sculptures are titled Deeply Rooted, and are constructed from tree roots retrieved from the floods. They feel organic and yet industrial and agrarian, as industrial elements grown out of them. One carries the words ‘Memorial’, another grows out of a broken shopping trolley – and they sit across the shiny floor like a flotilla adrift.
Dickens adds, “In some First Nation communities, a root facing the sky is a symbol that marks death.” Clearly, these were not easy pieces to make.
Equally loaded in symbolism, the billboards present scenes of an Aboriginal mermaid, riffing off traditional omens of warning they carry.
No Ariel mermaid princess here. Proudly black, she wears a Countdown T-shirt, fabulously blurring popular culture with climate doom. Looking weathered by the situation, and accumulating detritus like barnacles – cleaning up the trash of white folk – hers is a story of survival, not Hollywood zeal.
Another nice addition to this show is the repeated form of the life buoy, as wall-based sculptures.
Read: Exhibition review: Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world, Bundanon
Cunningham and Dickens have worked beautifully with the architecture of the space, stringing ropes and buoys to draw the eye up, and draping hessian fabric and tarps on the upper-level balcony.
A lone, silent Indigenous woven fish trap is exhibited in this upper space, overlooking the chaos below. It is like a timeless reminder to listen to the knowledge of our First Peoples on land management and care.
This is a cohesive and thought-provoking exhibition, and yet it is also extremely accessible to a range of audiences, allowing each to find their own connections and questions within the work.
The exhibition was first presented at Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, before touring to Wollongong Art Gallery.
Karla Dickens: Rise and Fall
Wollongong Art Gallery, Corner Kembla and Burelli Streets, Wollongong NSW
Until 1 June
Free
