Redfern Mural
However, over the course of the twentieth century, ecocritical scholars generated significant debate over mankind’s attempts to classify, signify and constrain the natural world. This discourse actively resisted the traditional inclination of a plethora of human cultures to express themselves by invoking elements of the material world. By overturning the conventional impetus to decipher “inherently voiceless” environmental objects in accordance to what human societies intended them to mean, we can apprehend the curious and mysterious possibility of ‘the material’ to speak on its own terms. In his seminal 2001 text Thing Theory, University of Chicago academic Bill Brown pondered the capacity of the natural world to “speak back” vis-à-vis the human actions which attempt to shape it. Brown’s idea of a symbiotic relationship between human and non-human spheres is paralleled by traditional Australian Aboriginal perspectives of land. Indigenous societies preached a spiritual, physical and social connection between its members and the surrounding world, in which aspects of nature – from rocks to trees, rivers to hills – are essentially derived of the same substance as their human ancestors who continue to exist through the environment. A stark cry from the contemporary view of land as a product to be developed and commodified. For example, the Aboriginal Flag mural in The Block, Redfern reflects this worldview, through its close placement of the signifiers of black (the Aboriginal person), red (the land) and yellow (the sun), therefore positioning the human and the non-human as co-dependent entities.
Recyclable aluminium 2018
Garbage – cans, metal, single-use items – is of paramount importance to recycling and environmental maintenance. However, the process of disposal is often overlooked and trivialised in our contemporary global capitalist system built on commodification. It is important to focus on the natural life cycle of manageable metals, thereby conceiving these materials as part of nature, in which their man-made elements constitute new paradigms of what nature can be and is. For example, the chemical and compound nature present in aluminium tins which store everyday kitchen foods and carbonated drinks encapsulate a considerable portion of our daily human waste. While the sheer number of cans, metals and single-use items in the photo above demonstrate the “ugly”, discarded economic view of nature, they may simultaneously be perceived as the basis underpinning a marriage between the everyday human world of commerce, life and enterprise with the non-human world of chemical reactions, cells and life. We too are connected and affected by a mundane, discarded aluminium can, sitting in a pile of garbage. This allows for a brutal and dim portrait of nature, evoking the chaos of human organisation.
Plane view 2018
The space in the sky, in which birds look down and ahead is a space inaccessible to humanity and presided over by airborne species. The view that our feathered friends enjoy everyday is commonly understood as a “bird’s eye view.” For us, the uncanny experience seems as if we are flying between worlds – the ground-world that feeds, nourishes and stabilises us, and the sky-world; the road of flying species. However, birds – just like humans – are confined in this earthly space, in the sense that if they were to travel further and further up, the oxygen would eventually not sustain them. The sky, the earth, water, air, land, places and spaces contain all forms of matter that connect us and everything until the boundaries of life are meshed and tied, formed and changed. The blue-greenness of everything is what the world as a whole bestows upon us: the further we zoom, the greater the two colours become a hybrid.
Banaue Rice Terraces, Philippines, Wikimedia commons
I tried to find images from the last time I visited my family's country, when I was fourteen. We took many photographs but now the images are lost somewhere. It’s interesting remembering a time when I was so physically close to my ancestor's location on the home they built and the land they maintained. The rice terraces surrounding the high mountain northern part of the country is understood to be carved by hand for generations and demonstrate a useful irrigation system that utilised the rainforests above the terraces. For this corner of the world, a history of years and years of farming demonstrates a mark of human presence and harmony with the land and its resources. Rice is a staple food in which it is not just eaten but is also a part of the people's culture and life. Through the land I am connected to my ancestors and through the image I am connected to the memories of my experience. I understand that there is a point of origin that I am a part of and it is the earth, through which there is a kinship with my bloodline and the soil, as well as all its resources. Nature touches and remembers all of us – all our ancestors and our future families. We are connected by blood, places, and nourishment which is a form of nature, for natural time is not linear.
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