As my creative year begins to very slowly wind up with what will surely be enough tension to carry it into next year, I’ve been left thinking about where the call to action is in the work I do, be it recording and composing soundscapes, walking, writing, visual documentation or community engagement.
Every day, we’re bombarded with enormous amounts of information and disinformation; the inherent messaging in art responding to where we are in the world today is caught up in this chaos. So, how do we carve out the space to slow down, think about what voices are missing, absorb new ways of understanding, and only then acting in ways that feel hopeful?
Hot air and echo chambers
As an artist, I might argue that exhibitions in the white cube provide the space and time to present different scenarios about the future in ways audiences might process and act on. Yet, the longer I do what I do, the less inclined I am to think exhibitions in institutionalised spaces are that impactful in their current form. They look good on your resume, they sometimes give you the peer recognition we all seem to want, and they make you feel your work is meaningful in the moment, but really…? Such a small number of people engage with works in galleries and museums in Australia, and they are often not the ones who most need to be reached.
I was part of an exhibition early last year in an active, artist-run space on a busy road in Sydney, where barely 100 people visited over almost four weeks. Later in the year, a group of us from the regions exhibited in a small coastal town in NSW, where more than 900 people visited over the month. The work in the regional show clearly resonated with the community there, and as artists, we worked hard to engage locals and a broader audience in conversations about the future.
In my experience, the presentation of art on social media often has much the same limited impact as the Sydney exhibition. Note how little engagement you get on platforms like Instagram and Facebook now. The people who follow artists are often not the ones who most need to hear the message or act on it. We’re just blowing hot air into our own echo chambers.
Not enough
There’s an exhibition currently showing at Somerset House in London exploring soils. It’s called SOIL: The World At Our Feet. From what I’ve seen of some of the works in development through social media and deep diving into websites, many of the works are stunning. I understand some are wonderfully immersive too. Reviews of the exhibition have described it as:
…a range of awe-inspiring works by artists and scientists from across the globe, deploying a plethora of mediums in an effort to convey the incomprehensible complexity, beauty and mysticism of soil…Visitors may leave the space seeing a previously mundane and muddy medium in a new light, teaming with wormy, alien life and holding the answers to many of the issues facing humanity. The overarching message of hope permeates the curation: hope that the soil can save us, providing we allow it to. – The Standard, 28 January 2025
Time Out wrote (23 January 2025): Can a topic as humdrum as the dirt beneath our feet be interesting? My answer is: sort of…It wants to be didactic, ending with a rallying cry about saving the planet from climate change, but unfortunately, the material on display isn’t enough to give it any oomph.
Despite what the staff writer at Time Out says about the show wanting to be didactic, I’ve also read and heard informal reviews suggesting that while many of the works are engaging and beautiful, there is a lack of information on what to do with this. It’s not the art at fault—this is putting a lot of weight on an ecletic collection of works to be clear about what we need to do to enact hope.
All this plays on my mind as I start thinking about how I turn more than a year’s creative research and documentation on-farm for my SOIL+AiR project into works that do more than just inform or inspire hope, but in the words of James Baldwin, they might lay bare the questions hiding in the answers I’m creating.
Maybe, I’m expecting too much?
Ambitious? Yes.
Likely to fail? Possibly.
More than just inspiration and education
During last year’s Regional Futures: An Entangled Existence exhibition’s public program, Tamworth-based artist Joanne Stead talked about taking climate positive action in her community focusing on the things one has control of. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting to learn about how your personal choices impact the environment or you’ve been a climate activist for decades, you can choose to take action at any point along the spectrum.
So, what could a show like SOIL: The World At Our Feet have achieved? Somerset House says on its exhibition webpage:
…visitors are invited to reconsider the crucial role soil plays in our planet’s health. The exhibition delivers a message of hope and urgency, encouraging a more sustainable, harmonious relationship with the Earth—if we choose to act now.
The problem with this statement seems to be in the words that follow: …the exhibition sets out to inspire and educate visitors about the power and the fragility of soil, its fundamental role in human civilisation and its remarkable potential to heal our planet.
No one likes a sledgehammer approach to issues in art despite a long, rich history of artists as activists, but to simply ‘inspire and educate’ seems completely inadequate given the importance of the subject matter. I haven’t heard anything of the supporting text in the SOIL: The World At Our Feet exhibition, but there’s also a ‘de-humanising’ notion in galleries that leaves it up to the wall labels or text to contextualise work instead of having accessible and regular face-to-face conversations and interactions with artists, often limited to a one-off event in the public programming. Wall mounted information or floor sheets are too often deliberately ambiguous and filled with elitist artspeak that does little to facilitate understanding or engagement.
Sowing seeds
There is no one solution to the polycrisis we’re now enduring. However, I see the lack of any clear call to action in some art presentations as being a lost opportunity given the urgency of the action needed at this moment in time. Without spoon-feeding those who engage with our work, leaving them with something tangible, achievable, experiential and empowering is surely a gift. It could be the feeling of experiencing an immersive work or something revelatory like listening to the life in soils, a question raised in an artist talk, the seed of an idea sown on a sound or storytelling walk, an invitation to add something personal to the work…Multiple touchpoints.
Between now and installing my work in the white cube, I’m seeking to define what those gifts might be and how to carve out the quality time for my audience to receive them and leave with action in mind. I see the time and space of this exhibition as a keeping place of ideas, invitations, provocations and actions nurturing tiny, insistent roots that will make their way beyond the gallery walls into public spaces and consciousness. There must be a beyond.
I recently read a LinkedIn post from Associate Researcher with People for Wildlife, Dr Christina N. Zdenek: We can all be part of the solution. We can all choose to support our declining biodiversity by planting locally-native plants wherever possible. This leverages the power of nature (photosynthesis), to repair nature…All it takes is motivation, knowledge, and teamwork.
Start where you are to sow the seeds.
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