Entanglement Reviewed
– Janice Falsone, May 2022
The distinctive carolling of the Australian Magpie (Cracticus Tibicen) echoes throughout the gallery, luring the hearer towards Noelene Lucas’s video installation Entanglement (2022). The bird’s sweet song is a cherished part of the Australian soundscape; it is a sound so familiar that we might not associate it with the profound risks of climate change, until our comfortable normality is punctured by the sharp commentary of Lucas’s activist art.
Entanglement draws on Lucas’s decades-long investigation of love, grief, and land from environmental and historical perspectives. Based in Sydney, Lucas has participated as an artist, writer, and curator in major exhibitions in Australia, Europe, and Asia. Lucas served as head of the Sculpture Department at the University of Western Sydney for 20 years, and she has taught at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University. Lucas is best known for her video art and its exploration of time and absence. Lucas’s work has long responded to issues relevant to climate change, with a focus on ecology, threatened species, and threatened places; her earliest work foreshadowed the potential for increasing conflict over water. Entanglement is a culmination of the artist’s decades-long interest in notions of impermanence, interconnectedness, and environmental activism.
Lucas refers to herself as a video artist with a background in sculpture. Entanglement draws on Lucas’s decades-long investigation of love, grief, and land from environmental and historical perspectives. The resulting installations invite audiences to engage bodily by moving through and around groupings of screens. Entanglement follows this pattern: twenty-one flat-screen televisions for the most part arranged on the floor and connected by cables to a central power source. Unable to experience the work passively from a distance, the viewer must tread carefully among the screens, peering down at them from above. Entanglement is simultaneously experiential, sculptural, and ephemeral.
Looped videos appear on the screens as evocative, non-narrative visual poems. Influenced by Lucas’s PhD research into how Zen Buddhist notions of time can be related to video art, the videos invite us to reflect on our relationship with, and reliance on, the natural environment. Each group of screens repeats a formula, establishing a pattern: a native Australian bird and its corresponding birdsong; full-frame imagery of moving water; multi-layered clouds in bruised hues; and bold text sourced directly from scientific journals, media reports, and opinion pieces charting our dismal failures in environmental stewardship:
…We are losing nature experience and gaining extinction experience…. Only 30% of all birds are wild… Coal mining is criminal in a warming world… 57% of all water pollution is from dairy and meat production… Who do our politicians work for? the Australian people or multinational coal corporations?…
In addition to the Magpie, there is a cast of disarmingly familiar birds including the Galah (Eolophus Roseicapilla), Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo Novaeguineae) and Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus Moluccanus), while water and cloud serve as elemental forces reminding us of the inevitability of change.
Two contrasting screens bookend the exhibition. The first is wall-mounted and presents an undulating expanse of water, a view of ocean or a large lake, with a hazy yet ever-present horizon. This suggestion of discontinuous continuity hints at Lucas’s Zen Buddhist and film theory influences. Blurred water droplets obscure the scene, forcing the camera in and out of focus like searching binoculars. Very occasionally, a seabird will skim across the bottom of the screen, offering a fleeting encounter with the common Silver Gull (Chroicocephalus Novaehollandiae). The video is overlaid with atmospheric terminology in white text (…Methane CH₄… Carbon dioxide CO2… Particulate Matter PM 2.5… Chlorofluorocarbons…); the words appear, expand, and then abruptly fade on different parts of the screen, mimicking the ebb and flow of the water. The final component of the exhibition is a large screen leaning against the gallery’s back wall in portrait format, presenting an honour roll of bird names and their dates of disappearance: a tombstone for Australia’s extinct birdlife.
Even with its heavy overtones and ominous text, the beauty and serenity of Entanglement prod us to imagine a better future. As we encounter familiar wildlife in an unfamiliar setting, it seems possible, if only for a moment, to transcend grief through art. According to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report “global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered”[1], resulting in sea level rises, extreme heatwaves, severe droughts, climate induced water stress and significant impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity[2]. Courage is required, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac write in The Future we Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (2020):
“…People feel real grief over the unspeakable loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, over how much we are about to lose, including the future of human life as we know it. Those who are enveloped by this grief may have lost all faith in our collective capacity to challenge the course of human history… It is important that we allow ourselves adequate time and space to deeply feel our grief… but we cannot allow it to erode our capacity to courageously mobilise for transformation.”[3]
Entanglement reminds us that we are not blameless for the climate crisis nor exempt from the responsibility to act. Much like the good-natured and inquisitive black-and-white Magpie, which is prone nonetheless to bold defensive swoops during nesting season, Lucas’s work embraces polarity and complexity. Entanglement unflinchingly confronts the audience with hard truths, while remaining accessible and relatable. Lucas’s work highlights the transience of the natural world, revealing hope in dynamism: change is not only possible, it is inevitable.
Janice Falsone is the Director at Canberra Contemporary Art Space
[1] www.ipcc.ch. (n.d.). WGI Summary for Policymakers Headline Statements. [online] Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/resources/spm-headline-statements/ [Accessed 12 May 2022].
[2] Buis, A. (2019). A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. [online] Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet. Available at: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperatures-matter/.
[3] Figueres, C. and Rivett-Carnac, T. (2020). The Future We Choose : Surviving the Climate Crisis. London: Manilla Press. Page 5