28 February - 16 April 2022

I gathered all your ashes and planted seeds on your grave
an exhibition by Emma Rani Hodges, Lachlan Richardson and Shosuke Suzuki.

‘I gathered all your ashes and planted seeds on your grave’ is an exhibition that artists Emma Rani Hodges, Lachlan Richardson and Shosuke Suzuki created to explore their differing relationships with our local land, ecology and human relationships with it.

All three artists live and work on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri people. After the catastrophe of the climate fires and covid-19 all noticed a shift in our community’s environmental consciousness. There was a strong urge to give care to the land, to grow vegetables, revegetate urban bushland, and delve into the vastness of Namadgi national park. We hope this shift won’t be short lived. 

The symbolism in Hodges’s work is guided by culture and identity, they’re a ThaiChineseAustralian. Coming from a diasporic background there is a strong desire to find spaces that sit on the margins of white development which is a cultural space that has historically rejected difference while striving to dominate. In the absence of social comfort, bushlands became a space of solitude and reverence. Hodges’s practice imagines new ways of honouring these spaces which include collecting rubbish and altering it, making Southeast Asian shrines with Canberran imagery for spirits with protective powers to inhabit and using Thai mythology to create new stories from their mother’s place of origin. In Woman Native Other, Trinh T Minh-ha writes about migrant women and subversive acts of storytelling. She asserts that the migrant is an expert storyteller, ‘having to reincarnate stories from the ashes of a past life’. She states that storytelling is a vital act as it allows one to anonymously shape and present their identity without bias from an outside representative, such as somebody from a dominate culture commenting on a marginalised group. Hodges uses this framework as a tool to explore their place in so called ‘Australia’ and works to incorporate a Southeast Asian aesthetic into their exploration of place, land and diaspora. 

Richardson is a landscape designer whose work explores the question: What do we need to do to transition our cities into ecological, biodiverse places? His short answer is that ecological landscapes need to be wild. With nature being so capable of doing things right by itself, Richardson’s job is to stop people getting in the way of nature, or better, encouraging people to appreciate it. To him this means creating the functional hardscapes that exist around homes and workplaces in a way that sits harmoniously with naturalistic plantings, allowing people to feel that there is enough control in the places they inhabit to not feel overwhelmed by wildness. These spaces must simultaneously create rich spaces of biodiversity. Richardson’s business Bluebell 2509 designed and planted the landscape outside Thor’s Hammer, visitors are invited to contemplate that constructed environment before and after viewing the installation. The containers that Richardson has created were put in various locations around Canberra, while left outside plants from the local environment seeded themselves in the boxes. Therefore, each container reflects our urban ecology.

Suzuki lived in a variety of places while growing up, each with their own histories, cultures, and languages. Now he lives in a different place again. He is captured by the soundscapes here, and all the histories that are entangled in them. Australia has a unique sound. It exists in a hemisphere that tilts differently on the earth’s axis from Japan, where he comes from and in some way his perspective always feels slightly tilted. Suzuki wants to listen more intently, for he is interacting with a place which is foreign, although increasingly close. For this exhibition Suzuki’s soundscape acts as a third, supporting dimension to hold the space of the works present. His work provides another, invisible, aspect, which allows the audience to resonate with and feel their ways into the recollections of the artists.

Opening function is proudly sponsored by Capital Brewing Co.

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