‘Ecological shadows’: Beached cryptid and tidal fish traps feature in ‘strangely prescient’ exhibition
A new group exhibition tests the waters of South Australia’s fragile coastal ecosystems, from colonial legacies to modern algal blooms.
A mysterious sea creature, several metres long, has washed up in the corner of the Flinders University Museum of Art. Its exposed, fibrous flesh is soft pink on one side, while something pitch-black and ominous leeches out the other. There are signs of movement — some struggled breaths, a few flashes of light — that suggest it isn’t quite dead yet. But one way or another, things aren’t looking good for this unidentified beastie.
It’s a scene not unlike those seen up and down the same southern ocean you can just about glimpse from the Flinders University campus. For months, social media feeds have been filled with tragic and grotesque imagery as an offshore algal bloom in a warming sea has coughed a toxic catch of sharks, rays and smaller sea life onto the state’s coastlines.
When curator Belinda Howden began working on what would become Crosscurrents, a new group exhibition at FUMA, there were already signs that South Australia’s marine ecosystems were facing unusual pressures.
“The beginnings of the project had these kinds of ecological shadows already, and it’s obviously amplified in a huge way,” Howden explains.
It began in late 2022 and early 2023, as the floodwaters that breached the banks of the Murray and made headlines around the country flowed out to sea, turning Horseshoe Bay cloudy and brown.
Mary-Jean Richardson’s The Drowned Face (always staring towards the sun) comprises a series of ‘tonal paintings’ that capture the changing palette of surface water in the Port Elliot tourist hotspot over many months, from those “muddy” colours to the seafoam greens of the 2025 algal bloom.
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“What also happened, through the course of the artists making their work, was that their work sort of became indexical,” Howden says.
Sea Notes and Sea Maps by Port Elliot-based artist Chris De Rosa consists of dozens of handmade paper sheets made using seawater. Partly inspired by De Rosa’s own experience of swimming nearly every day in Horseshoe Bay, each sheet offers a paper-thin snapshot, with specks and flecks seagrass and algae enmeshed with the pulp.
The exhibition also reflects on attempts to arrest the decline; across the gallery, Honor Freeman’s Swollen features stacks of sandbags cast in porcelain, inspired by coastal rehabilitation programs to replenish posidonia marine plants that capture carbon and create habitat for fish.
There were moments during the creation of the exhibition when Howden encountered “signposts” of an ailing ecosystem that were even more explicit.
“Going up to the Yorke Peninsula to see Sonya Rankine in her home studio, there were roadside warnings about AVG (Abalone Viral Ganglioneuritis) — an abalone virus. You were not allowed to fish, dive or collect.”
From Rankine’s home studio the Ngarrindjeri, Ngadjuri, Narungga and Wirangu artist was taking an even longer view of the upheaval and destruction visited upon the coastline. Her work, GUUYANGGA-BARNDA – FISH TRAP, is a woven tribute to the Wadla waru / Wallaroo tidal fish trap in Garnarra, in northern Narungga Country.
“On a recent visit with Peter Turner, a Nharangga yardli (Narungga man) and cultural guide, he explained the cultural significance, design, concept, construction and traditional use of Guuyangga-barnda,” Rankine explains in the exhibition notes.
“Nharangga dhura (Narungga people) constructed traps along the coast of Guuranda (Narungga territory). Utilising existing rock pools, they strategically placed barnda (rocks) high enough to enclose the pools, allowing guuya (fish) to swim in during high tide, feed on muuya (seaweed) and remain trapped at low tide.
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“Since colonisation of Guuranda, Nharangga dhura have been unable to maintain the Guuyangga-barnda and, over the last 150 years, the traps have eroded. Thousands of years and generations of work maintaining the design and technology of the Guuyangga-barnda was halted within six generations of invasion of Nharangga banggara (Narungga country).
Narungga artist Brad Darkson examines the modern edge of the same colonial project with Blue water rule. A video installation of night-vision surveillance footage, it explores how a desalination plant and a research facility harness and appropriate the waters off metropolitan Adelaide.
“He decided to focus on these two sites, because they’ve got these long pipes running along the floor of the Gulf, the sea floor, that basically go out and extract seawater and pump it back out the other end. He was interested in that type of control over the commons, the control over unceded Sea Country.
In turning his own lens onto these high-security sites, Darkson interrogates ideas of power, control, and authority.
“These sites are visible; we can go and see them, but you can’t enter them, but they engage with that coastline that is shared, you know?” Howden reflects. “Brad’s work is often about control — it’s about those power structures.”
As for that big not-quite-elephant in the room?
“It’s a creature that hasn’t been classified yet, it’s come from the depths and washed up in the gallery,” Howden says of the ‘cryptid’, created by artist Michael Kutschbach out of materials including glass, plastic, silicon, and wax.
“It’s decaying in a way, it’s in a state of undoing,” Howden explains. “There’s a strange prescience to the work; his object washed up in the gallery at the same time that all these creatures were washing up along the shore that come from parts of the sea we don’t get to see normally.
“It has taken on a new level of kind of timeliness,” Howden reflects, of Kutschbach’s cryptid, and the exhibition as a whole. “And a sort of currency as well.”
Crosscurrents is showing at Flinders University Museum of Art until September 5. An artist talk and catalogue launch will also be held on Thursday August 28 as part of SALA Festival.