Solastalgia - Meaning

Combining the Latin word solacium, meaning comfort, with the Greek root algia, meaning pain, Australian philosopher Glen Albrecht introduced Solastalgia to our vernacular to describe the sense of existential distress associated with the negative impacts of environmental changes to our loved home environments. More simply, it is a form of homesickness felt when you have not left home.

Exhibition History

Solastalgia, was officially launched in March 2017 at Gray Street Workshop in Adelaide’s city centre. ​Since its inception, stupefying exploitation of our natural resources, drought, wild fires and a pandemic have ravaged the country and our souls, dividing our attitudes and resolve. Healing of country and ourselves permeates our thinking and has galvanized the artists in this series of exhibitions into action.

Solastalgia has travelled to Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, South Coast Regional Art Centre in Goolwa, Fabrik Arts + Heritage in Lobethal as part of Adelaide's Fringe Festival, an online exhibition during Covid lockdown and will surface again with new contributions to the SALA Festival at Signal Point in August 2022.

Eco-art Connections

Art is a place we can explore our profoundest fears, doubts and uncertainties about our shared existence, but it is also an innovative space to speculate about how we can respectfully recreate, reclaim and nurture the places that we love.

Believing the regional artist's voice to be crucial to the development of a more relevant and inclusive conversation, Solastalgia has evolved to meet this need and continues its emergence as a touring event connecting Adelaide based makers with regional artists and galleries across South Australia.

Exercising flexibility and responsivity at each location, the exhibitions are providing a platform for artists and audiences to share their personal/political, local/global responses to lived and anticipated experiences of climate change; to pay homage to the natural world, and to reflect on our health and well being in relation to its preservation.

​​The collaborations fulfill a need for transformative ways to mitigate the grief and disconnect experienced as a result of environmental loss. Mindful making and immersion in the creative experience, in the compassionate company of others, is a sustainable way to strengthen the well being of artists, audiences and their communities. Eco-art connectivity can uncover valuable networks of knowledge about arts practice whilst building an understanding and shared appreciation of a region’s ecology. “There isn’t a person on earth who couldn’t use a connection with nature.” Nalini Nadkarni

These pages give thanks to all participating artists, galleries and audiences. It is also a quiet tribute to a botanist uncle who gave me my first Rapidograph pen as a child and introduced me to bracket fungi, tiny orchids and moss worlds in the scrub lands around Meningie and the Coorong. The samples I helped collect and press are held in the State Herbarium. Sadly I have little of his extraordinary knowledge, but I see through his heavy lenses as I bumble about the bush, the coast and the wilds of other artist’s minds in search of inspiration and remnant signs of hope in support of our shared love and grief for all the wild wonders on this planet.

Jo Wilmot | Artist & Curator