There are many variations of the premise that Earth would be better off without humans. Plants would invade our abandoned buildings, infrastructure would rust and crumble, and all our artificial goods would slowly decompose and fade away, leaving behind a rejuvenated environment free of human interference. Ideas of self-healing planetary systems become problematic when we look more deeply at the blurring edges between ourselves and the environments we influence and rely upon. Curated by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s Anna Briers for the University of Queensland Art Museum (UQAM), These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature proposes that delineations between the natural and artificial are now so intertwined that they are essentially inseparable.
My introduction to These Entanglements began with a group reading by Brisbane artist Caitlin Franzmann. Under the shade of a tree near the UQAM lawn, four of us joined the artist around a gorgeously crafted wooden table where she invited us to sit and focus on our breath, to gaze upwards at the entwined canopy of the tree, then downwards to the root systems at our feet. We took turns holding and shuffling the divination cards made for recompose (2022–onwards). This deck features 30 illustrations of organisms in the Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens. The artist’s intimate readings offer insights into these organisms’ unique behaviours and philosophical possibilities.
The first of three cards drawn for our group, our past card, featured a neat series of dots encircled by a fine boundary line. A single word on the card read ‘coalescence.’ Here, Franzmann described the phenomena of slime mould. Neither animal, plant, nor fungus; slime mould is instead an intelligent network of organisms that come together to navigate the environment. We listened to the artist speak of the importance of working in unison, the impacts of our actions on one another, and meaningful communication between parts of the whole—all fitting ideas to prime ourselves for the rest of the exhibition.
Inside UQAM, we began a curator’s tour of the exhibition on the museum’s upper level. A small screen met us at the top of the eastern stairs, depicting an endless stream of pungent smoke pouring from a linear flare. Harsh flames contrasted sharply with a calm ocean and serene sky. John Gerrard’s Flare (Oceania) (2024) employs a custom game engine and photographs by Tongan artist and activist Uili Louisi to create a dynamic seascape. This generative work tracks time, transitioning gradually from day to night in harmony with Tongan time. A sense of fear evoked by the relentless simulated gas flare mirrors the unfolding urgency facing the citizens of Tonga. At the frontline of human-induced climate change, the Tongan population will face relocation as ocean levels rise and natural disasters worsen. There is tension and elegance in Gerard’s virtual work, which is a stark reminder of the lived impacts of grandiose consumption of natural resources.
In the following room, Metabolic Scales (2023) by the collaborative trio Open Spatial Workshop (OSW)—Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, and Scott Mitchell—offers a nuanced exploration of our dependence on steel. This subject matter is all the more timely given the recent $2.4bn Federal and South Australian government bailout of the troubled Whyalla steelworks. The artists passed a small rock around the audience featuring thick burgundy-coloured bands. This iron banding formed around 2.5 million years ago in a newly oxygenated atmosphere when cyanobacteria began converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into oxygen. These iron deposits symbolise the genesis of complex geological, biological, and social interrelations that comprise life as we know it. Elsewhere in the room, television monitors hang on the walls and rest against steel beams placed on the floor, adjacent stromatolite sculptures and an LED sign. Floor-based videos depict calm seas against rocky shores near iron ore extraction sites in Western Australia. Other wall-based screens show the hustle of railway tracks at a busy Japanese station. OSW informed tour participants that between our houses, modes of transport, and other daily activities, we each individually account for 15 tonnes of steel. We are utterly reliant on this material for physically sheltering, moving, and sustaining us, yet we often overlook the impacts of its production. Metabolic Scales juxtaposes precious source minerals against the weight of steelmaking processes and physical end products, questioning where the balance lies in this web of interactions, challenging these industries’ social and environmental costs, and how we continue to justify them.
A palpable sense of eco-anxiety builds throughout These Entanglements. On the gallery’s lower level, Gold Coast artist Norton Fredericks’ intimate cyanotypes, Field Samples (2024-25) and Blood Test Results (2024), while visually gorgeous, grapple with the reality of industrial toxins invading our bodies. Fredericks displays personal blood test results documenting the presence of ‘forever chemicals’ known as per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in their body. Alongside these results, Fredericks presents delicate botanical works featuring local plants, including bunchy sedge, asparagus fern, blue cow pea, cumbungi, mangrove, and common native reed. The artist sourced local water contaminated with the same chemicals measured in their body to produce these cyanotypes. Fredericks presents evidence of the unavoidable truth that these PFAS are all around us and within us. And if they now live with these toxins inside them, the uncomfortable likelihood is that we do too.
On an adjacent wall, a painting by Pitjantjatjara artists Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton reverberates with intricate detail. Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) (2022) traces the beautiful contours of the artists’ ancestral lands while also drawing attention to the legacies of British nuclear testing on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. The 1953 ‘Operation Totem’ atomic tests at Maralinga forced the displacement of Muffler and her family. The resulting radiation is still measurable in the soils of APY and continues to cause devastating sickness and death. The painting benefits from its placement near Angelica Mesiti’s five-channel video installation, Over the Air and Underground (2020), a gorgeously saturated investigation into vast forest communication systems. The afterglow of Mesiti’s immersive magenta-hued space creates a soft iridescence around Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country). Muffler is Maringka’s aunty, and their creative and familial connections speak to the importance of intergenerational dialogue, kinship, and knowledge sharing in addressing and healing from disaster and trauma.
Alicia Frankovich’s montaged screen-based installation, Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies (2019–22), is overwhelming and captivating. Collaged imagery in suspended backlit prints and videos challenge taxonomic hierarchies with the screens resembling a series of open browsers where no one image reigns over another. Flowers appear alongside disembodied organs, fungi, planets, cells, rocks, and other found and created imagery. High-definition photographs sit alongside, on top of, and underneath amateur snaps. Precision, mess, growth, and decay present themselves all at once. Pleasing visual relationships within and between planes merge and recede, but there is no sense of order. It is a fitting bookend for the exhibition, with the proposition that our long-held systems of categorisation may no longer serve us.
A choreographed performance work, Feather Star (2025) by Alicia Frankovich, promises a raucous and joyful experience that extends her work through the inclusion of bodies and movement. Co-commissioned and co-presented by UQAM and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, this work uses queer world-building to explore new ways of living and being in a world defined by overconsumption. Two performances of Feather Star will be held at UQAM on Friday 28 February at 1pm and Saturday 1 March at 3pm. The Saturday performance is part of the UQ Arts BLOCK PARTY programming, a free community arts day featuring workshops, tours, heritage, and more.
Plenty of uneasy moments arise throughout the exhibition. While human-induced climate change has been urgent for some time, confronting the realities of this crisis is still challenging. Yet These Entanglements: Ecology After Nature feels positive in tone. The exhibition decentres the human subject in favour of examining the impacts of our activities, and there is an acknowledgement that we need to find new ways (or rekindle established ways) of communicating and collaborating. The artists provide us with hope via threads of deep thinking, embodied knowledge, First Nations kinship, and connection to Country.
There are widening fractures within our social and political environments and the arts in Australia, and the uncomfortable truth is that, whether we like it or not, we are in this together. We are entangled. The role of the arts in these ongoing conversations is vital; more than ever, artists need support to examine the challenging issues of our times, and institutions like UQAM, which continues to deliver compelling and rigorous exhibitions, deserve credit. Artists’ ambitious visions bring us new possibilities and ways of thinking and being during times of upheaval. Art helps us move forward with discernment.
Kylie Spear is an arts worker, writer, curator, and artist living and working on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples (Brisbane). She is currently the Senior Public Art Coordinator at Brisbane City Council.
