In 2018 Shepparton Art Museum invited me to create an education lab for students, teachers and Greater Shepparton community for March/April 2019 whereby participants were invited to contribute to an evolving art space on a weekly basis. The artworks reflected real and imaginary possibilities with differing scales. Walls were painted blue and green, referencing both artificial cgi screens and the colours of earth’s land masses and oceans.
The 1968 Apollo8’s photograph of Earth Rising was a conceptual catalyst for GreenLAB, a pivotal image for the emerging environmental movement of the 1970’s and highlights R. Buckminster Fuller’s phrase ‘spaceship earth’ to describe our planet. This image of the earth in dark space draws attention to both vulnerability, community and scale. The idea of macro and micro connective systems impacting countries, people, habitats and individual species exemplifies how biota is enmeshed with abiotic elements, both requiring each other for survival.
My aim was to invite participants individually and collaboratively to engage in the space, and through attention in art making, the notion of caring for the environment and species might be enacted at a personal scale. Projects included: DrawUp/DrawDown, a large wall drawing of a real or imaginary forest resulted in both articulation and erasure of the subject matter, Hybrid creatures: a mass of morphic plant/animal clay creations, Observational drawings of living plants in beakers within the gallery and the Blue Rock project encouraging individual and group collaborative practices within and outside sam’s gallery context.
Heather Hesterman 