The remaking of things

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
NGV commission for Melbourne Now 2023
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Friday 24th March – Sunday 20th August, 2023

An extended version of our responses to several questions posed by NGV’s Elisa Scarton, about our Community Hall Artists-in-Residence and our NGV commission, The remaking of Things, featured in the recent NGV Magazine, Issue 39, March–April, 2023, p. 40.

Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison are the inaugural Community Hall Artists-in-Residence, leading discussions focused on the care and protection of our local environment and presenting workshops for visitors of all ages, from March. Here, Haby and Jennison share more about their role as wildlife carers and their Melbourne Now work, The remaking of things, 2023.

How does it feel to be the first Artists in Residence in Melbourne Now’s Community Hall? And what are you most looking forward to sharing with visitors?

We are utterly delighted to be Artists-in-Residence and looking forward to sharing our enthusiasm for wildlife, in particular, Grey-headed flying foxes, with NGV visitors. We are in awe of them, and learning more about them, flying foxes, has opened our eyes, hearts, altering our very way of being. Beyond an early appreciation of the nightly thread of flying foxes heading out in search of food, we’d little knowledge of how critical they are to our forests. They are our pollinators. They are the reason we have trees, diversity. They are an umbrella species which by name alone means they afford support to all those beneath the canopy of their being. We owe so much to them, those ‘night gardeners’, feasting on nectar, pollen, and fruit. So, we’re hoping this will be a chance for people to see how interconnected all beings and systems are. To learn more about wildlife. To ask yourself: what can I do to help wildlife? Will I become a volunteer rescuer/foster carer? Will I advocate for the flying fox when they are misjudged by others? Will I share my fruit tree/garden with others? Will I participate in planting and weeding days in my community? What action can I take and what action will I take? Look around you and imagine what it is like for wildlife. What green corridors can you help strengthen and extend? If a single Grey-headed flying fox is capable of flying 50 kilometres a night and dispersing 60,000 seeds, which is incredible, what action, daily, weekly, more frequently, can you do to be more reciprocal with nature?

In addition to being artists, you’re also wildlife foster carers. Do the two callings inform and inspire one another in your day-to-day practice?

They both feed into the other, absolutely. In a practical sense, as our home-based studio currently houses a 1.2 metre by 1.2 metre enclosure in the middle of it, and our back garden, a 1.8 metre by 1.8 metre enclosure, which is pretty much the sum of each space, wildlife and art are not only wing by wing, but one and the same. The two enclosures are set up especially for the flying fox pups, and this pup season, which typically commences mid- to late-spring, we’ve cared for eight orphaned pups. When they move from the incubator, when they’re young and cannot thermoregulate for themselves, to the indoor enclosure, and finally the outdoor enclosure, they have a safe space in which they can stretch their wings, and build their muscles, as they learn to fly, interact with each other, and all those early days things particular to every living creature. In sharing a space, physically, they inform what and how we work. We feel incredibly fortunate to share a space with them. To see them up close. To see how incredibly flexible and agile they are in contrast to a drawing or a museum specimen. Every part of them is alive with flight. To care for them. Clean their wings (when they are really young). To learn from them. They let us into their world and it is an absolute privilege. And it drives us to make sure that everything we do is considered, has a reason, is part of a conversation. For us, we felt it was no longer enough for us to make work about animals; we must also do something, now, and every day. To paraphrase George Monbiot when he commented that government’s, the world over, talking about environmental action is a substitute for action, for us: art cannot be a substitute for action.

Your work for Melbourne Now sends a really beautiful message about protecting biodiversity and growing nature. How do you, as artists, communicate messages like conservation in your work and why is it important to do so?

With our 35-metre-long by 5-metre-high collage, The remaking of things, especially for Melbourne Now, we wanted to create a restored habitat from pieces in the NGV collection, with the emphasis on it being restored, because none of us can afford to lose this threatened species. When we began making this work, we focused not on what we have lost (habitat, biodiversity, stable climate), but on what we can grow. Something new and hopeful by the banks of the Birrarung: habitat for the Grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus). Something looking forward. We hope people who might not have really given much time over to thinking about flying foxes come away with an understanding of the vital role flying foxes play in ensuring the survival of our native forests (through seed dispersal and pollinating plants).

Do you have a favourite artist/work in the NGV Collection to which you often return?

Having spent our time cutting up and into the digital files of Grace Cossington Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935) and Kuringai Avenue (1943) (with permission from the Estate of Grace Cossington Smith), Anne Paulson’s Sketches of Victorian bush flowers (c. 1861), Fanny Anne Charsley’s lithographs from The Wildflowers around Melbourne series (1867), and Louisa Anne Meredith’s gum-flowers and ‘love’ (c.1860), our answer, of sorts, would have to be all of the above. We selected pieces which were either out of copyright, or we had permission to use; pieces that large format digital files already existed of, and pieces, like works on paper not currently on display, which could be rephotographed with a view to growing ten-times their original size on the gallery wall. Working with the NGV, we selected pieces that would help us create a promising forest thrumming with life. We also included a watercolour of a microbat (c. 1800s) by an unknown artist for those who might be inspired, having learnt about megabats, to learn about the amazing world and role of microbats…. But that’s for next time.

Read online (NGV)

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, The remaking of things (detail), 2022–2023, especially for Melbourne Now. In the section above you can see a detail from Grace Cossington Smith’s Kuringai Avenue (1943), and John Lewin’s Variegated Warbler (now known as Variegated Fairy-wrens), both in the collection of the NGV. You can find a full list of the components within our collage here, to nut out further details.