Leaf-blowers and ‘quiet activism’ as artists respond to an age of eco-anxiety
A group exhibition at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental pits the cathartic whirr of a leaf-blower against the ‘reciprocal care’ of woodland regeneration in a bid to heal audiences in an era of ecological crisis.
“It’s very brave of us, I realise, to have leaf blowers in a space with a temple full of dried tea leaves,” Danni Zuvela, artistic director of Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, tells InReview.
When we speak, Zuvela is hours away from opening the doors of ACE’s latest exhibition, a group show entitled Leaves: Eco-Anxiety. Among its half-dozen contributors is a new work from Jingwei Bu, a performance artist and ACE regular known for incorporating tea ceremonies into their art practice. This time, Bu’s contribution includes a tower of paper and calming ‘temple’ made of silk, which Zuvela says features “this beautiful carpet [of tea leaves] underneath”.
“She’s been collecting the tea leaves for four years – four years of tea leaves.”
Zuvela says that each work in Leaves, from Bu’s temple to a yarning circle by Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri artist Bryce Cawte, will offer audiences a different kind of “remedy” – a way of responding to an age of eco-anxiety.
“The whole idea of Leaves was to acknowledge that ‘eco–anxiety’ is a defining condition of our time,” Zuvela says. “But rather than describe it, we wanted to meet eco–anxiety with agency.
“Our era has normalised ecological polycrisis. We’ve gone from the Greenhouse Gas scares of my childhood to a more or less constant and overlapping series of dramas – and I think South Australia feels it more intensely.”
Zuvela says the exhibition was initially conceived with an international focus back when Adelaide was being mooted as a host city for the COP31 conference, with ACE to host a kind of “counter-symposium” full of “really weird” art.
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The “flagbearer” of the exhibition is Stephanie Doddridge, one of several artists on the bill who has completed a residency in ACE’s upstairs studio space (Leaves’ spot in ACE’s exhibition schedule partly replaces the usual group show of studio residents that took place in the latter part of the year).
Doddridge’s contribution is one of the more meditative works, created alongside another exhibition, Tools for Quiet Activism, launched during SALA Festival at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens’ Museum of Economic Botany.
“As an artist, I’ve always been interested in the natural world and how humans relate to nature, how we care for nature, and how nature can then provide care back to us,” Doddridge tells InReview.
A keen home gardener, Doddridge has spent years drawing from her own backyard for her work, from printmaking to textile works dyed with foraged plant materials. Her latest pieces look further afield to Frahns Farm in Monarto, a 550-hectare site run by conservation non-profit Bio R and dedicated to restoring woodland habitat in the outer Mount Lofty Ranges.
“They’re regenerating what was farmland, and planting habitat for biodiversity to support native birds and support the habitat loss that’s under that’s happened in the Mount Lofty Ranges,” Doddridge explains.
“I went out there over the course of almost nine months, witnessing the work there, witnessing what the ecologists were doing, the core volunteers, and also helping out by sorting and planting seedlings in their big planting festivals.”
Doddrige’s contribution to Leaves bears witness to the resilience of Bio R’s work on the farm, both in video work and by making casts of the ground itself.
“It’s a very harsh environment, and they’re constantly evolving and adapting their practices down there,” she explains. “In some years, the plantings have been more susceptible to failure.
“Each year they reiterate and get better and better, but there were some planting holes that only had weeds in them – so I cast them with plaster.”
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Another poignant inclusion comes from former ACE studio resident Trudy Tanberg, who passed away earlier this year. Primarily based in Mount Gambier, Zuvela says Tanberg was “a phenomenal printmaker, installation maker, and community organiser”.
“She was very interested in irrigation in her region, and so her remedy is an instructional work in the tradition of Yoko Ono and Flux. Hers is a series of ideas that restore the wetland landscape with a series of small digging actions to divert the water flow that is being drained.
“It’s a very conceptual work – it’s just words, it’s an idea – and it was her last artwork. [It was] a sign that, you know, she was working regionally, but she was working in the very highest registers of contemporary art.”
As for the leaf blowers? That’s a different kind of catharsis, delivered by Alycia Bennett and Floria Cinco who have created a “very fun noise installation involving a leaf blower and a karaoke machine to sing your cares away”.
“The noise in this case is meant to be a bit obnoxious,” Zuvela says. “But there’s a bunch of social critique in there too – because obviously leaf blowers blow nothing, nowhere. It’s a very futile, noisy kind of thing, but it’s such a natural thing for a noise musician.”
The work includes a leaf blower hanging from the gallery ceiling, set to an erratic timer with no one – not even Zuvela – quite sure when it will go off next.
“It’s not exactly going to relieve a lot of people’s anxieties, but noise has a cathartic quality to it, and the sort of self-organised, community aspect of noise, I think, is something very powerful.”
Hours before the doors open, Zuvela is, on reflection, confident that the leaf blowers and the tranquillity of Bu’s work can coexist—and notes that much of the work on display will be “very carefully composted” when the show concludes anyway. “It’s a very non-precious show.”
“Jingwei is a good sport, though – and there’s also plenty more tea leaves where those came from.”
Leaves: Eco-Anxiety is on display at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental until December 5
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