“Spring” Group exhibition
Milford Galleries
IN the 10th and 11th months of the year in Dunedin, it is not too late to present a springthemed group exhibition. Especially one that takes as its curatorial origin the oftenunseen exchanges and interactions that unfold and take form beneath the soil or in symbiotic interactions between soil, plants, insects and atmosphere. This is the world of chemical reactions, molecules and microbes, the latter of which cannot but infer microorganisms including viruses or the virological. These associations make valid connections between climate, ecological entwinements and the consequences of taking too much from the earth.
Works by two artists in particular engage these interrelations: Caroline Earley’s polymorphic ceramic sculptures of interlocking amoebic forms, and Peter Trevelyan’s skeletal polymer structures encased in bell jars. Where Earley brings a pop sensibility to her appropriately egregious, uncannily sensuous, rounded small sculptures, Trevelyan’s spare, spiky geometric shapes and unruly towers are stripped of flesh, and perhaps struggling for oxygen in the specimen jar. Despite their quite different physical and formal manifestations, both sculptural styles animate sensuous and nonsensuous experiences of living in the Anthropocene — the era of socioecological crisis and extinction.
If winter is a temporary death, and spring a return to life, then our current season is a bittersweet vantage from which to apprehend pandemics, fires, melting ice and loss, because it is life itself that is threatened by climate emergency, including the recurrence of recognisable seasons such as spring.