THEA JONES
Thea Jones, Noriko Nakamura, Virginia Overell, Lucreccia Quintanilla, Ella Sowinska, Mashara Wachjudy. Curated by Julia Murphy.
Exhibited on Wurundjeri country
The Honeymoon Suite, Brunswick VIC
26 October — 18 November 2017
Everything spring is not about spring, although it is about the seasons, and the weather, and the environment around you. It is about the blurring of the seasons in an overheating world, with the underbelly of capitalism supporting environmental destruction. It is about the spaces we occupy: the urban and constructed sites, built through colonial invasion and capitalist expansion, and the natural environment that is rapidly undergoing global warming, rising sea levels, the bleaching of coral reefs, and drastic changes to weather.
Everything you experience is through the lens of your own consciousness. With your ‘self’ at the centre of the world, your emotions feed into the schizophrenic weather patterns we see now. In an essay entitled We Are the Weather, Brian Kuan Wood suggests, “your feelings control the weather because on the one hand you are insane, and on the other hand because they actually do.”[1] We have entered a new geological epoch proposed as the Anthropocene (although the term and its starting point are continually being debated),[2] where human activity has caused climate change on a global scale. These threads bring up certain questions: how do you negotiate both the environment around you, and the broader environment; how do you manage to see the entirety of the world, and the rapid onset of climate change, from a limited perspective?
Everything spring does not offer solutions to these questions, but can potentially offer ways of looking, and thinking about environment. The artists collected here all work with a sense of the environment around them. In the space of this building, natural materials coalesce with digital frames. Thea Jones’ work comprises paper made from reconstituted eucalyptus leaves, suspended behind Perspex and held motionless on the wall. The paper appears like museum specimens or archival documents—but an archive of plant material instead.
Read the full essay.
WORKS:
Thea Jones
Tie together (i), 2017
Reconstituted eucalyptus leaves, perspex.
31 x 42cm
Thea Jones
Tie Together (ii) & (iii), 2017
Reconstituted eucalyptus leaves, perspex.
31 x 42cm each.
Photos by André Piguet.