NUCLEAR (DE)FORESTATION, MOVEMENT II: TRIBUTES FROM HIBERNATION, 2020.
“It is not to deny the seriousness of the ecological predicament... For if, as we have seen our entire landscape tradition is a product of shared cultures...The cults in which we are to seek in other cultures...are in fact alive, well and about us, if only we know where to look for them.”1
This preceding new body of work aims to further amplify the surveying of its predecessor and further investigate the buried mythos behind Australian forestry, its survival throughout the most recent catastrophic events2, the upheld and rehabilitation of country and nature as a consequence of social eradication/hibernation in the epidemic era.

It is without any disbelief that this year has begotten an unprecedented set of nationally distressing events. The January Australian bushfires becoming an international awakening showing the signs of climatic adjustment, and COVID-19 in which the entrapment through quarantine have withheld and sustained the world into a state of post-humanism normality and granted us a much-needed state of sociological and environmental hibernation3.
It is with personal belief, that these events have been in needful intention to redeem a studious perspective into the preservation and care for the Australian ecosystem in the world. The new body of work is to represent a displaced man-made arcadia, made under the quarantined-vacuumed- thirst to explore, regain and re-acquaint contact with the wilderness – “For in wildness there is the preservation of the world”4

By dwelling into a contemporary understanding of logging practices, the preservation and protection of Australian forests, the reclamation of forests and sustainable practices in native Gunai/Kurnai country, Movement II seeks to bring a refined and demanding consensus, an antidote to the industrial society 5 to establish and implement native knowledge and care into sustainable practices and industries for the environmental wellbeing of future generations.

1 Simon Shama, Landscape & Memory - Introduction. 1995.
2 Australian late Dec. – Jan. Bushfires, 2020.

3 The Gifts of Hibernation, Andréana E. Lefton, 2014.

4 Max Ohlschlager, The ideas of Wilderness, 1991.

5 Henry David Thoreau/ John Muir, Life in the woods, 1854.

Made and presented in Brayakaulung County.