Gray Street Workshop

30 March – 7 May 2017

Adelaide and coastal dwelling artists delivered the inaugural exhibition of Solastalgia at Gray Street Workshop, with works investigating the intersection between human activity and the altered natural environments along our beaches and reefs. A lively opening night audience crowding Gray Street workshop’s intimate space was silenced by a stunning voice soundscape from Choral Grief before Tony Kanellos, (Cultural Collections Manager and Curator at the Santos Museum of Economic Botany) officially launched the exhibition and artists delivered talks about their exhibition work.

Contributing Artists

The visual and tactile pleasures of Leonie Westbrook’s intriguing memorial collection of washed up hotel toiletries and a tide tumbled, broken dinner set, teased our own ethical twinges about what is collectable, desirable and why? Jeweller Claire Brooks’ delicate architectural forms entered the sculptural realm, using light, balance and shadow to amplify its deadly plastic cargo caught in the steel seaweed structures. Lesa Farrant’s fragile line up of augmented plant specimens, coupled with botanical names, exposed the alarmingly permanent legacy of our impact on our coastal environments. Jo Wilmot’s ellipsoid exhaust tubes framing black porcelain castings of sea algae, stressed our culpability in the erasure of marine ecosystems from oil spills and warming oceans.

"In the end our society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy" 

Edward O Wilson