Craft ACT Artist-in-residence 2014: Bogs and Fens

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At ground level they are plain looking and undramatic, though burst into diversity, colour and life when explored up close and over time and with the knowledge shared by others: traditional owners, rangers, scientists and archaeologists.’ Her portrait is sharp and visceral, an homage to the time spent learning in and around Namadgi National Park, that her residency afforded her. And it is in her experience and reflection that we can begin to consider how, in modern Australia, we can renature our vocabularies to grow more environmentally capable and aware. Craft ACT’s artist-in-residence program offers us this most enjoyable and engaging message: that we must give one another and ourselves opportunities to talk, make, and live with our environments more often than we already allow ourselves to. Through Craft ACT’s artist-in-residence program, held in partnership with ACT Parks & Conservation Service and the Australian National Botanic Gardens, three artists – Annee Miron, Sally Blake and Satoshi Fujinuma – were invited to spend a sustained period of time in Namadgi National Park, and after some research, interpret the theme of ‘the environmental protection of bogs and fens’ in their making. What these artists produced was a renaturing of their creative and expressive vernaculars. They have produced work that incorporates traditional European, personal, cultural and contemporary interpretations of these marshy ecosystems. Through their artistic languages of reflection and creation, we are offered detailed and diverse meanings for and incarnations of ‘bog’ and ‘fen’. These artists have made beautiful definitions of nativeness Above: Sally Blake, The Ecological Thought (detail), 2015, Crocheted paper yarn. Image courtesy of the artist. PAGE 14
Bogs and Fens: a rtist-in-residence and modern suffering, of fragility and interconnectedness articulated through spindling cardboard, and the robust life‐giving mechanisms presented in the form of seed-pods thick with colour. Miron, Blake and Fujinuma have formed their own illustrative ecosystems of meaning that connect, strengthen, and interplay with one another on the exhibition floor. They have given us a modern dictionary from which to graft our own understanding of bogs and fens. Moreover, their work reminds us that definitions are, by nature (and in nature), multiplicit. Each piece celebrates the diversity of human that is welcomed by country: to relate to and interpret it, so long as that environment or landscape remains the creative message or priority. It is through this lens of environmental understanding that artist-in-residence Sally Blake continually looks to, ‘develop a deeper understanding of the interconnections between nature’s pattern and processes, and humans place in the whole.’ It is also through the language of environment that Japanese artist-in-residence Satoshi Fujinuma can still draw on his passion for finding an usual element of the landscape that prompts him to ask, ‘how does that work, and why?’ and through environmental questioning can draw an environmentallyreflective answer and aesthetic. In forming this creative bond to the environmental experience – whether as a maker or an exhibition patron – we are reminded that each of us has a responsibility to country. Each of us has our own connection to the inescapable ecosystems that make our place exactly what it is. We host our own ability to talk and think about what we see, or feel, or smell – both in the exhibition space and outside, with the grass crunching beneath our feet. It’s easy to forget this, or forgo that responsibility, but in the exhibition environment, we are offered an encounter with nature, and willingly, we step in. We meet ecology face-to-face. By engaging in the 2014 Artist-in-Residence program, we are invited to renature our vernaculars in a wholly international, yet very personal way. We are invited to orient ourselves by reading a dictionary of meanings about bogs and fens and by engaging with these aesthetics, each of us might develop a deeper understanding of the environment so immediately influenced by and near to us. Despite this, to the eye, a bog remains perhaps a little unflattering. The sound of the word might take on deeper meanings with the guidance of these three fine makers, but just as an immediate glance at the word warrants a slightly distorted face, it takes time and immersion to appreciate the word’s beauty. Talking about the bog and fen system, Satoshi Fujinuma admitted with the most subtle humour and graceful reflection: ‘The bogs and fen appeared very little, and it was only scenery of a boring wetland. However, a precious thing is hidden there.’ PAGE 15
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Craft ACT Artist-in-residence 2014: Bogs and Fens

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