“‘Am I being a good custodian’, ‘Am I building a future I want my antecedents to live in?’”
Two delightfully curious and enticing abacuses by Wanda Gillespie point to a speculative new economy. Following their cyborg aesthetics – carved from wood yet with geometric lines that mimic circuitry – you can almost imagine the future counting house to which they belong, where wise women use this unknown system while children play.
Curator Tulleah Pearce locates twinned seedlings for An Alternative Economics in the podcast If Women Counted, 16 July 2020, by artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck, and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, 2017. Together, these texts highlight undervalued and undercounted areas while posing new economic structures for living a good life. Their knowledge echoes throughout the exhibition, which brings together a suite of contemporary makers: Five Mile Radius, Gunybi Ganambarr, Wanda Gillespie, Katie Paterson, Make or Break, Keg de Souza, and Shevaun Wright, each offering alternatives to the mantra of eternal growth.
Wanda Gillespie, Counting Frame 2 (pink and green), 2021, brass, rewarewa timber, jelution chip carved stand, coconut beads, wooden beads, gouache, and wax finish. Courtesy the artist and Institute of Modern Art, Queensland
“The exhibition is about care and waste, First Nations’ perspectives on connection to country, and time as a circular notion,” Tulleah explains. “Often it is the things that really matter to us that create quality and value in our lives, which bigger economies and systems don’t think about,” she continues. The exhibited artists share the conceptual territory of valuing these “other things.”
In Katie Paterson’s Future Library: A Century Unfolds, 2019, authors write books for unveiling in 100 years’ time. The work is a gift to unknown generations of the future and a reminder that our actions reverberate along non-human timescales. Gunybi Ganambarr’s sacred cultural designs, marked out in striking patterns of silver and aqua on recovered housing insulation, equally conjure the long temporalities of First Nations’ knowledge, care, and creativity.
From these uplifting timescales, Shevaun Wright’s Teddy Bear Lien, 2022, returns us to the haunting present of Native Title processes. In her reworking, Wright asked six non-Indigenous participants to prove their continuing connection to a toy. Tulleah notes, “As objects the childhood toys are down-at-heel and a bit funny . . . the humour creates a safer space to talk about the larger issue.” Mimicking dry legalese and invasive bureaucratic systems, Wright reveals an inability to quantify loss, and the ongoing harm of Western systems that make this attempt.
Katie Paterson, Future Library, 2014–2114 Photograph: © Rio Gandara / Helsingin Sanomat Future Library is commissioned and produced by Bjørvika Utvikling, and managed by the Future Library Trust. Supported by the City of Oslo, Agency for Cultural Affairs and Agency for Urban Environment. Courtesy the artist and Institute of Modern Art, Queensland
Tulleah notes, “another thread that draws the artists together is an investigation of materials.” Five Mile Radius reimagine the building industry’s discarded materials as furniture and interior design. Make or Break move their investigation closer to the artworld, sourcing their materials (gyprock, timber and MDF) within the gallery. Here “closeness” doubly manifests as an “intimacy” between the audience and artwork; the participatory work invites audiences to recycle the gallery’s used walls. “What you discover about the gypsum by handling it and thinking about it in relation to yourself,” Tulleah says, “is what all of the works hope to do. There is a meditation that they bring to the present, [prompting the questions] ‘Am I being a good custodian’, ‘Am I building the future I want my antecedents to live in?’”
Shevaun Wright, Roo from Teddy Bear Lien, 2022, childhood toys, digital prints, vinyl text, documents, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Institute of Modern Art, Queensland
Another exhibition might use data to compel us to live in different ways. Tulleah replies, “The power of art is that it provides a secular space for having emotional conversations about topics that are overly politicised or imbued with numbers . . . Maybe this is art’s answer to economics: that the qualitative is just as meaningful, perhaps even more, than the quantitative.”
Keg de Souza’s striking Not a drop to drink, 2021, fills the exhibition’s final room. Between two layers of a circular glass table, de Souza preserves drought tolerant plants, mapping out a potential dinner party for surviving our climate future. Like the exhibition in total, it is equally pressing and optimistic, urging us to care for the future by living with integrity in the present.
Institute of Modern Art
7 May to 9 July 2022
Queensland
