Royal Botanic Gardens: Fiona Hall and Janet Laurence

Overview

The 2010 Biennale of Sydney with its theme The Beauty of Distance — Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age addresses nature and its existence, one of the facets of our world that can’t speak for itself (or at least, can’t speak in words that everyone can hear). Two of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Fiona Hall and Janet Laurence, take centrestage in the environment debate with their works in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, a site loaded with colonial significance and layered with the Western notion of capturing and containing flora.

Laurence’s WAITING — A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants (2010) calls to mind the regal authority of having one’s own medicinal garden, but the perspective is overturned: the plants are in their own waiting room, sick and needing help. In another subversive action, Hall has installed several hives of Sugarbag bees in the gardens. These bees, native to Australia, smaller than the recognised European bee and stingless, are in dwindling in numbers in the Sydney area but are being slowly reintroduced. Hall’s The Barbarians at the Gate (2010) comments not only on the threat to native species by the introduction of foreign ones, but the patterned beehive boxes representing different nations also speaks volumes on xenophobia in our society. Also on show is Choi Jeong Hwa from Korea with the Unbearable Lightness of Being (2010).

Image: Breeding Ground by Fiona Hall.