Symbiotic Ecologies

Symbiotic Ecologies

16 November – 8 December 2024

Ellen Dahl
Kath Fries
Talitha Kennedy
Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria

curated by Kath Fries

Symbiotic Ecologies is a creative response to the most pressing issue of our time – the climate crisis.  Curated by Sydney artist and curator Kath Fries, the exhibition engages with ecological thinking as foundational to renewed symbiotic relationships with nature, affirming the interconnectedness of life and all living things. This approach seeks to counter the pervasive pessimism of eco-anxiety and solastalgia, feelings of loss associated with negative environmental changes that have already occurred.

With practices spanning diverse media including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and photomedia, the exhibiting artists work with a range of scales and variety of materials from textiles and leather; paint and photography; turmeric, fungi and beeswax, to create multi-sensory works that invite emotive and multifaceted understandings of ourselves as enmeshed within complex biodiversity.

Black leather hand-stitched soft sculptures, created by Talitha Kennedy, conjure the uncanny and embody a sense of fraught intimacy with the natural world. Working with or around specific landscapes, Ellen Dahl poetically investigates the pivotal role that photography plays in the ways that we see, feel and relate to the world around us. There is a distinctly queer sense of camp and humour in Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria’s paintings and sculptures, evoking a dream-like realm with anthropomorphic characters, drawn from his personal experiences and relationships with the rural and wild ecologies of Walbanja Country, NSW. The material-led processes foundational to Kath Fries’ practice evoke enchanted encounters with insects and fungi, these specific more-than-human life forms are often overlooked or avoided, yet essential to biodiverse ecologies.

The works in the exhibition offer threads of connection, open conversations, and alternative perspectives that hint at various possible pathways forward, challenging ingrained assumptions of human dominance and disconnection. It is from this position that the works in Symbiotic Ecologies communicate shared sensibilities, re-centring us with nature and the more-than-human world.

Collectively the artists in Symbiotic Ecologies suggest that imagination, creativity, empathy and hope, can be combined to shift our attitudes and understandings in the face of the climate emergencies in which we all now live.

Talitha Kennedy, Effigy for Repressed Entropy 2015 – 2018, leather, thread, polyester fibre, silica gravel and wire, dimensions variable approximately 450 cm height