Another dance to the music of time
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“The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, if you touch one thread you send shudders running through all the threads that make up the web. But we are not just touching the web we are tearing great holes in it.” Gerald Durrell
Duration
Director
Jean-Pierre Chabrol
Cinematography
Jean-Pierre Chabrol
In the artist’s lunch a group of artists and friends discuss the exhibition and think about the idea of belonging.
We step back more than 20 years to 2004 and to the planning for Andrea’s exhibition Ware and tear at our former property ‘Hillgrove' in Central Victoria, Australia.
“Conservation means preserving the life of the whole world”.
In the artist’s lunch a group of artists and friends discuss the exhibition and think about the idea of belonging.
The exhibition Ware and tear took place in April and May 2005. The artists that created the exhibition were John Wolseley, Andrea Hylands, Alex Selenitsch, Edwina Kearney, Robert Jacks, Ruth Hutchinson, Julie Gough, John Dent, Peter Churcher and Jean-Pierre Chabrol. These artists were joined by geologist Clive Willman and dentist Ben Keith.
Ware and tear was opened by the Director of the National Gallery of Australia (retired) Betty Churcher. The exhibition was visited by thousands of people from different parts of Australia. Ware and tear was dedicated to the memory of friend, potter and broadcaster (BBC), Mick Casson OBE.
You can read more about the Ware and tear exhibition and the artists in the John Wolseley art resources book written by Peter Hylands and John Wolseley with contributions by Sasha Grishin and Andrea Hylands.
Since that time Robert Jacks and Betty Churcher have died and we remember our friends here for their talent and generosity as artists, curators and teachers. We miss them.
I wanted to revisit the Artist’s lunch because it was prescient in so many ways, certainly in our lives it was. So what of our friends at the lunch?
Both John (Heartlands and Headwaters) and Robert (Order and Variation) have now had major exhibitions of their work at the National Gallery of Victoria. Geologist Clive has mostly retired and lives in Castlemaine, Ben has given up dentistry to concentrate on Australian health practitioner regulation to keep everyone on their toes (as well as his many other interests). Jean-Pierre who filmed the clip is now living back in Paris. Julie has had many exhibitions in different parts of the world (including the group exhibition at the British Museum and National Museum of Australia Engaging Objects: Indigenous communities, museum collections and the representation of Indigenous histories) and Alex continues to pursue his idea, producing a series of thoughtful exhibitions (including LIFE/TEXT at the Heide Museum of Modern Art) as well as teaching architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.
As for Andrea and I, and after threats, vandalism and assaults, the bulldozers were to come and although we owned the Hillgrove property of course, the local government, the Mount Alexander Shire, decided to put a road through the place, a road to nowhere, that destroyed our wildlife conservation projects and took out our cultural infrastructure and many of our belongings in Australia including Andrea’s studio and a vast array of equipment and intellectual property. In doing so taking out many of the region’s international links and a sizeable chunk of its creative economy. We subsequently understand the road was not built and that many of the trees on the original property have been destroyed as development takes hold. We think of the many Australian animals that called the place home.
The idea of this story and revisiting The artist’s lunch came to me during a return visit to Castlemaine to start emptying a store we hired six years earlier in which to leave artworks and other precious things. It was in fact our own personal Pompeii, a time capsule where we discovered plastics bags full of toothpaste and soap from the house’s various bathrooms and the unwashed coffee cups of those terrible days of dismantling the property as we made our hasty retreat. We love the world but after this work is done we will never visit the region again, the memories remain too painful and raw. A sad end to a long belonging.
The Ware and tear exhibition was very much about the environment, as it was of what the property Hillgrove meant to us all. Our experiences in this place and all the events that occurred there make me want to recall the also very prescient remarks of Gerald Durrell. This is what Gerrald had to say.
“Even today people do not realise the extent to which we are destroying the world we live in. We are like a set of idiot children, let loose with poison, saw, sickle, shotgun and rifle, in a complex and beautiful garden that we are slowly and surely turning into a barren and infertile desert. It is quite possible in the last few weeks or so, one mammal, one bird, one reptile, and plant or tree have been driven just that much nearer to oblivion.”
“The world is as delicate and as complicated as a spider’s web, if you touch one thread you send shudders running through all the threads that make up the web. But we are not just touching the web we are tearing great holes in it.”
“You can exterminate an animal just as successfully by destroying its environment as with gun or trap or poison.”
Gerald Durrell’s quotes are from Catch me a Colobus Gerald Durrell, 1972.
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