Past | Colonial Ecologies and Counter Mapping

Sarah Jane Moore, Way Down Deep She Lies, 2020.

Linda Knight, Tree during Covid, 2020. Pencil on paper.

Colonial Ecologies and Counter Mapping

Sarah Jane Moore and Linda Knight

11th - 15th April 2023

Sarah Jane and Linda first met in 2016 and this exhibition interrogates the visual art tracings that transpire through sharing writing, thinking, mothering, gathering, walking, talking and feminising. ‘Relation: Colonial Ecologies and Counter Mapping’ inspires climate conversations, it maps counter narratives and it explores the possibilities of precious rivers, sacred urban spaces and safe, unnamed places.

Sarah Jane presents six works on canvas board. The visual art works are framed in Tasmanian oak and evoke lost worlds, ecologies of memory, and moments in time. The scarred tree remembers the bush fire, the Black Swan a time when rivers where black with kin, the River Gum stands tall, the lake deep. The Tasmanian Waratah distils a dance and provides the circle of family connection whilst the moon bird flies too close to the sun. Sarah Jane’s art explores the materiality of living in lutruwita Trowunna Tasmania where she created the works which are made with ground oyster shells, river clay, she-oak charcoal, tree sap, sand, mutton bird oils, gold leaf and acrylic paints.

Linda Knight’s works provide a voice for future generations. She is curious about how climate change enacts political, environmental, technological, and social shifts and how this affects urban lives and spaces. This project speculatively imagines future cities and the strange, chimeric, bio-speculative urban citizens that populate cities now and in the future. She explores how humans, insects, weather, animals, refuse, and bio matters are contemporary urban citizens that will morph into the dominant urban citizens of the future. Using concepts of posthumanism, new materialism and feminist theories of matter, Linda’s troubles the hierarchies and privileges that underpin urban design and the precarious, monstrous future cities that are emerging all around us.