Collaborators Ken + Julia Yonetani have used unusual materials such as salt, sugar and even uranium glass to make objects of well-crafted beauty which underscore the impact of human activity on the environment.
Their recent body of work entitled The Last Supper addresses themes of food production, concerns arising from increasing salinity levels and environmental toxins; the impact this has on food production and food safety and related environmental consequences.
The work draws on the still life genre as an artistic tradition that emerged as current agricultural practices were being developed, bringing new food produce to the tables of a rising European bourgeois class. The work transcends the two-dimensional painted surface of traditional still life painting, drawing sculptural elements together to create an intimate representation of contemporary issues. The themes of consumption, luxury, vanity and mortality portrayed in these early paintings are re-enacted in this sculptural installation. By depicting a lavish traditional table setting, Ken + Julia Yonetani make reference to current issues relating to food.
Ken + Julia Yonetani, The Last Supper, 2014, working detail. Courtesy the artists, Artereal Gallery and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre
Commissioned by Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, and developed during a four-month residency at the gallery, the installation recreates The Last Supper dining table as a nine-metre-long banquet sculpted entirely from salt.
Using salt as the artwork medium brings focus to the environmental cost of agricultural production and continues to connect with traditional practices with the historical associations of salt as a powerful, sacred substance that maintains life by enabling food preservation, but also becomes a metaphor for the rise and fall of civilisations throughout history, and the issues of environmental decline, climate change, and food security that concern us all on a global level.
“Here salt is a metaphor for the death of the land, sacrificed in the production and consumption of what has become The Last Supper,” the artists state. The Yonetani’s wanted to use the beauty of salt and spirituality to depict the death of the landscape. Consumption and environmental decline are issues at the forefront of the work with salt highlighting the death of the ecosystem from which the groundwater is pumped. Through their work, the need for a conscious awareness of where food is sourced and how its consumption effects the environment is reinforced and aims to educate audiences of the environmental devastation faced by the region.
Ken + Julia Yonetani, Still life: the food bowl, 2010, Murray River salt, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artists, Artereal Gallery, Sydney, and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, Sydney
They directly reference the water issues of the Murray-Darling Basin, known as Australia’s “food bowl”, because it produces a large percentage of Australia’s fresh food; 550,000 tonnes of salt is pumped out of the ground every year to curtail the rise of salinity. In their sculpted still life tableaux, the Yonetani’s have formed fruits and vessels from the salt drawn from the groundwater of the region.
As observed by Megan Fizell in a 2011 essay, by “depicting the nourishing foods that maintain life…cast in a substance that simultaneously preserves food and prevents growth”, the Yonetani’s have embodied and explored both life and death.
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre
22 March to 4 May 2014
Sydney
