Visual artist Kelly Hartland has one of those voices that draws me in… a voice like a well - full of stillness, depth and darkness.

Kyla’s notes
I interviewed Kelly in a crazy day of ten back-to-back interviews with regional artists. All had created work for an exhibition called ‘Climate resilience is…’ - a collection of nineteen works responding to the brief of adapting to the escalating impacts of climate change.

Not all works in the exhibition seemed to be ready to ‘adapt’ - many appeared caught in the moment of realising the magnitude of the problem - like Chris Duffy’s pop art piece - ‘A muffled scream’ and Lauren Starr’s digital photograph ‘Out of time’. Other works seemed more focused on issues of mitigation - trying to remedy the problem as opposed to negotiate the symptoms. A bit like a cross section of responses you’d find anywhere, really. I found resonance with Kelly’s work in particular - in it she posed a question that I’ve been thinking about for some time, ‘do we have the insight to save ourselves…?’

My part in all this was putting together the video - a durable record of the exhibition - bringing images of the work, alongside photographic portraits of the artists taken by the talented Carmen Bunting - as well as bits of audio interviews conducted by me and Rob Law’s evocative music. I enjoyed devising and making the piece - playing with the different aural and visual rhythms and not having to get too strung up about story and narrative drive.

It makes me wonder what the bigger role of art - and artists - is in all this - this time of “unstoppable loss”. As it becomes increasingly unlikely the warming of the planet will stay below 2 degrees, let alone 1.5 - is art’s role “to agitate, bear witness - to console?”

I borrow these words from James Bradly - in a keynote lecture I watched the other morning. He came to what felt like a grounded conclusion - that’s worth borrowing too - that art’s role might be to find ways of talking about/seeing/hearing the world, that can show us the way forward and engage with the textures of the crisis - the loss, fractured connection, temporal derangement - and to help create imaginary spaces where we can see the past, present and future in new ways…. That opens up spaces where we can imagine different and better futures… something to think about.

I’ll post a link here to the video one’s it’s cooked - and if you are local - you can catch the exhibition at the media arts festival, Conflux, happening in Bendigo September 9-10, 2022. 

The art project was coordinated by Michelle Goldrick and funded by the ADAPT Loddon Mallee