Nature and Consciousness

Deborah Sleeman

I search for gaps in which to create a dialogue between the intangible connections and commonalities of people and the natural world: to explore the animate and inanimate in our world as integral rather than separate entities and the embodied meaning of objects and their connections to life, place, and otherness.

A fascination with the interface between opposites informs my work. What happens in the space between land and sea, between night and day, between living and perceived non-living. It is the space between life and death, where the infinite and invisible resides. It is a constant challenge to imbue the built form with this invisibility.

Imagining the future through fragments of the past, connectedness to place, and the deep resonance of the elements are the fuel for my work.

Fran Callen

This canvas is embedded with connections between drawing, motherhood, and natural history. In the process of making, domestic routines and intergenerational flow of knowledge mark evolving palimpsest across an unstretched canvas ‘tablecloth’. My children participate. Objects are traced and sketched as they pass over the table, marks layered between found domestic and natural pigments, holding stories of our immediate surroundings. This process documents my family’s relationship with domestic spaces and its impact on the natural world. It becomes a form of education as we record our learning about the space we live in. Mark-making interprets geological terms learnt from my geologist father, exploring the fascination with geology’s time-based parallels with drawing processes. The record of Earth’s history is preserved in rocks, and the narrative of mark-making is similarly preserved within drawing.

Thank you to Uncle Cliff Coulthard for ochre from Yalmarralpana Ochre Pit, Adnyamathanha Country.
Thank you to Zakki (7) for crushing the natural pigments.

John Foubister

My consciousness self reflects, and scrutinises, in the hope of achieving some delineation. It meanders, is fog filled, parameters undefined.

I wander through our backyard garden all alive underfoot and overhead, accompanied by incessant internal chatter seeking to contain. Hey! Leave it be. Leave it’s very much too bigness, and much too smallness, undiminished by the play of my consciousness. In time we’ll all come to dwell in nature’s border-less, bottomless, timeless garden.

Lee Salomone

A Jigal tree leaf fell on my head in a friend’s garden politely demanding to be transformed. The three bronze Jigal leaves that compose Second Nature create a space for nature – everything has a voice worth listening to and learning from.

Maarten Daudeij

Art is like prayer. It is an acceptance of the Heart as the place of agency or willing. Such is non self-based knowing, of Love’s tending towards joy i.e. beauty or celebration as the nature of who we are. This is both nature and consciousness.

Sonali Patel

Trees and humanity share a long history of nurturing each other for survival. Described as ‘raining gold’ from the spectacular yellow leaves, the ginkgo is a living fossil.. The ginkgo is the oldest living tree species and despite dramatic climate changes, it has remained unchanged for more than 200 million years. Ginkgo co-existed with the dinosaurs and is a symbol of longevity. Their stunning yellow fan-shaped leaves fall like rain in autumn and cover the ground in a golden carpet.

These artworks are an abstract colour montage of the sensations felt in the presence of the ginkgo and personify the movement and vibrant, energetic fields between our psyche and nature.

Susan Bruce

I am between two worlds. In one, I can see humans are crawling on the brown earth, butterflies are communicating with humans. Seeds are growing above the ground as well as underground. To me, trees are more valuable than diamonds. In my world, I float amongst the clouds, smell flowers, and swim underwater like a squid. I am free, and I am not ‘earth bound’. I am not heavy-footed and I don’t need to be always standing upright. I am at one with the weather. I see people communicating with flowers and bees, and flowers and bees communicating right back. I see pigs in all their size and pinkness walking around us. In this world, humans and non-humans co-exist rather than have a hierarchical existence. Humans are no longer at the top of the chain.

In this other world, it is bleak and dark. Flowers, petals and bees are imaginative things. We are now completely covered up as the air is toxic. I look up, and the sky is always dark, and the light is always artificial.

Sue Michael

Since the 1970s, I have observed the burgeoning awareness, with the finest of details, that technology-based, analytical perspectives of plant studies have brought. I have been a counterbalance to such approaches, for I have long sought books that explicate direct and intuitive plant communication. With the recent findings of researchers such as Dr Monica Gagliano, I feel a sense of atonement for being curious about the wisdom of plants.

When visiting a new place, I silently ask the trees, ‘What is it I need to know from you?’ This is using the heart as a sensory organ. It’s my way.