Annette Bukovinsky: Colloquy 2022

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Annette Bukovinsky

Colloquy

30 August - 17 September 2022

Annette Bukovinsky's latest exhibition Colloquy reflects upon the widening range of environmental fluctuations in our world.

The Latin word colloquy means to speak and encompasses the most serious discussions or high-level and intense conversations. Rather than simply oral conversations, Bukovinsky uses the gallery space as an opportunity to create a visual language as a device for encouraging dialogue.

For Bukovinsky, the planet is conversing with us in an impassioned and vehement voice through intense floods, drought, fires, heat waves, or the accelerating loss of biodiversity and speak to the intensity of our climate crisis. With this new body of work, she asks how can we begin to understand the intricacy and complexity of this crisis and how as an artist, can she explore complacency as well as comprehend an undeniable complicity?

Colloquy presents a plurality of ceramic and mixed media works that explore philosophical questions regarding socio-cultural relationships with the natural world. Utilising found objects and symbols is one way Bukovinsky asks deeper questions about our current ecological crisis. In Clouded Judgement, the minimal fluorescent construction strap holding the ornate ashen ceramic presents a sombre moment of tension. Industrial Markets and Limbs similarly pair disparate materials to create metaphors such as the boundary peg speaking to land rezoning and the charred timber resonating with the bushfires. In many of Bukovinsky's works, clay is the intervention through which she expands or condenses the meaning of readymade or industrial objects.

The body of work presented in Colloquy is contemplative and sombre in mood. They are a series of visual thoughts that look to prompt questions and conversation regarding our place within ecological instability and they underscore the urgent need to listen to the environmental changes that are happening around us. The exhibition is an invitation for colloquy: between artist and audience, and between the natural world and the culture of contemporary consumption.