For the last six years Lizzie Buckmaster Dove has been working around the theme of the moon and tides, inspired by regular walks around her local area. The immediate surroundings of Coledale, a seaside village located between Sydney and Wollongong, have become an integral part of her art. Dove combs her local beaches for that which is manmade as both reference and actual material for her work.
Dove’s most recent assembled body of work, ‘Solastalgia’, held at NG Art Gallery during November, comprises found plastic objects and marine debris, that have been washed ashore. The work addresses themes around the cycle of the moon, tides and how our actions are never confined to the moment in which they occur.
Like other artists working with found objects washed up on the shore, she combines a love of serendipitous discovery with an appreciation of pattern, texture and a metaphysical connection to the environment; its seasons, moods and extremes. The very mundanity of her harvest, cleaned and sorted by colour, suggests an archaeologist of the present, cataloguing and archiving what it means to live right here, right now. But there is also a more poetic dimension to Dove’s method, a desire to capture fragments of the more ethereal qualities of existence. It lives again, in a new form, and tells a new story. It speaks of the moon, the lunar cycle, the sea, the rise and fall of tides; it is strong yet fragile and delicate. It is part of us, it is community, it is the people, the sea, the sky, the surrounding world we live in and love.
In researching this series, Dove gained access to scientific plates on foraminifera – microscopic sea life that is local to her coastline and is carried along by the tides. Their tidal migration is mirrored by the marine debris she collects, forming a structure through which to view her finds.
By contextualising these finds within the structure used by marine scientists, inspired by specifically contemporary plates on microscopic sea life (foraminifera), and more specifically by the wondrous illustrations of Ernst Haeckel (a German scientist and philosopher who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapping a genealogical tree relating all life form), she arranges them in tins and behind glass. As tins they are notated with data specific to the finds; the moon cycle name, location, lunation, time of moon rise and set, distance of the moon from earth and what the tides were doing. The plastic undergoes a kind of transmutation, becoming a ‘relic’ particular to this time and place.
“Solastalgia” is a term coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean the loss or grief experienced when faced with environmental change. The built and natural environments are now changing so rapidly that our language and conceptual frameworks have to work overtime just to keep up. Under the intertwined impacts of global development, rising population and global warming, with their accompanying changes in climate and ecosystems, there is now a mismatch between our lived experience of the world, and our ability to conceptualise and comprehend it.
Dove attempts to present these ideas in a way that is comprehensible, combining scientific collection and research processes along with habitual and environmental concerns to create works of aesthetic as well as pedagogical importance.
NG Art Gallery
5 to 23 November, 2013
Sydney
Drift Rise Swell Tide, 2013, marine debris, tin, paint, 29 x 20cm
Moon Cycle (last quarter detail), 2013, marine debris, tin, paint, 28 x 73cm
Courtesy the artist and NG Art Gallery, Sydney
