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The skull bone experiment and Feral Experimental

The skullbone experiment: a paradigm of art and nature; Feral experimental: New design thinking

Ingrid Periz
Eyeline 82
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Reviewing landscape painter Philip Wolfhagen’s retrospective at Newcastle Art Gallery in 2013, Christopher Allen noted the artist’s predilection for the far horizon, for that point ‘where the eyes focus on infinity and everything between becomes a vast emptiness’. This long focus is unusual, given the familiar need to squint in Australian sunlight. (Wolfhagen lives in Tasmania where the light is softer.) In Allen’s words, the national protective reflex ‘makes us look at things close to us, (and) prevents the gaze from releasing into the distance’.1

The distance-killing squint offers a handy analogue for conceptualising our self-understanding of our own place within the landscape, and by extension, the natural world. As the belated, and guilty, recognition of continued human short-sightedness in the natural world helps to underwrite contemporary environmentalism, it finds an alternative model of the human relationship with place in Aboriginal art. Both help feed the renewed and ongoing interest in Australian landscape painting.

Two very different exhibitions recently in Sydney at the UNSW (University of New South Wales) Galleries mulled aspects of the human relationship with the natural world, The Skullbone Experiment: A Paradigm of Art and Nature and Feral Experimental: New Design Thinking. The former was conceived, in the words of environmental philanthropist and project supporter Robert Purves, to deploy art’s ability to function as a ‘connector between people and nature’, in order to foster the ‘engagement of the majority of the community’ that major conservation efforts require.2 Feral Experimental, on the other hand, focused on recent experimental approaches to design thinking, most of it in urban settings. It looked specifically at ‘strategies for negotiating significant contemporary challenges’, among them environmental degradation in its various manifestations

Benedikt Groß, Avena+ Test Bed, 2013. Photographer Florian Vogtle/ Stefan Eigner, Pilot Hermann Benkler, Image courtest the artist.

Benedikt Groß, Avena+ Test Bed, 2013. Photographer Florian Vogtle/ Stefan Eigner, Pilot Hermann Benkler, Image courtest the artist.

Imants Tillers, Skullbone Plains, 2013. Acrylic and gouache on 24 canvas boards, 152 x 142cm. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane. 

Imants Tillers, Skullbone Plains, 2013. Acrylic and gouache on 24 canvas boards, 152 x 142cm. Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane.