STELLA CLARKE: LANDSCAPE TO EARTHSCAPE

This exhibition, created in partial fulfillment of a Master of Visual Arts, explores the practice of landscape art in the context of global environmental crisis.

The artworks were made amidst goldfields bushland, which, though beautiful, is successive to major industrial-extractive disturbance and subject to climate threat. The focus is upon responding to what is known about this fragile environment, as much as what is seen.  The genre of 'landscape' is taken toward the diversity of 'earthscape', inclusive of habitat and multispecies. Damage to ecosystems is a consequence of human ability to disconnect from the natural, or material world of which we are part.

Inspired by eco-critical thought, and eco-materialist principles, these artworks opt for sustainable processes and aim for a planetary aesthetics. The work is on paper, with organically unstable mediums such as kino and charcoal. Generative of life, carbon is also the colour of mourning; solastalgia is expressed in these artworks, but also care and the desire to connect.

A closing event for this exhibition was held on Thursday 6 June @ 5.30pm with the artist, Dr Stella Clarke, and remarks by Dr Carole Wilson, Higher Degrees by Research Coordinator, Graduate Research School, Federation University.