Alex Wisser for Cementa/Wayout responded to the Sunflower Collective Exhibition in writing. Read the full article here: https://cementa.com.au/blog/2022-01-21-the-sunflower-collective-at-wayout
Here is an excerpt:
‘The first thing to notice about this exhibition is that it has no title of its own, but takes the name of the artist cooperative who’s work it presents: The Sunflower Collective. The blurb is more a description of the group than the exhibition:
“The Sunflower Collective is a self-organising collaboration of regional artists” and the exhibition is composed of “work that would have been conceived and developed through practices of engagement exploring how collective knowledge is accumulated and communicated; how we can move as a collective to produce actions of change informed by ecofeminism.”
Despite not having any declared theme, the exhibition definitely has the coherence of a unified conversation. This could be put down to the fact that all of the work addresses environmental concern, but a common content does not account in itself for the unity of anything. An exhibition that can be reduced to its thematic is an unsuccessful exhibition. Instead, the unity of this exhibition lies in the tone or tenor of the work, all of which possess a sense of quietude that first draws my sympathy. The unprepossessing nature of the work is consistent throughout the exhibition, uniting the variety of voices through their common soft spoken quality. This unity is complimented by another commonality, the solitude of each body of work and the isolated nature of the disparate experiences presented.
This solitude perhaps most poignantly manifests in the work of artist Kelly Leonard, who combines long woven skeins of recovered industrial copper wire, wool and quartz into a large hanging textile apparatus. The work itself is actually functional and the artist has installed it in the industrial remnants of the extractive industries around her home in Broken Hill, recording snatches of random radio broadcasts that happen to wander into the net of her contraption. These broadcasts are played, along with video projected onto a woven skein through which the projection leaks, creating a strange ghostly presence behind the screen. The imagery consists of the artist weaving at a loom, and engaged in ritualistic exchange with the landscape. Occasionally a title such as “Ask that mountain” appears along the bottom of the screen over an image of the artist walking slowly, methodically toward a mountain. “Ask that lake” and the artist walking toward a lake.
The meaning of the work is opaque, but comes in snatches of obscure affect like radio waves collected on the improvised apparatus that composes it. There is the mute sense of the desire to communicate, to commune, to relate, to the landscape more than to the audience. The artist’s figure walking toward the mountain, alone, within the instruction to ask that mountain. Ask what? Yes, what. The means of communication are as obscure as the meaning they are meant to transmit but I understand it. It is the desire to relate to the land, to communicate to the land, perhaps to apologize and to ask forgiveness, to pay it a respect we know is in vast arrears, an obligation in cosmic deficit.
In the end, what is transmitted is the silence, some static, a garbled transmission pulled from the sky and the intense, frustrated, lonely and earnest desire to communicate.’
Image: Kelly Leonard Transistor photography by James Farley
