Adelaide Contemporary Experimental. 26 Sep 2026

 

In mounting its current exhibition, Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, ACE artistic director and exhibition curator Danni Zuvela poses a question: “Amidst ecological polycrisis, what practical, cultural or mystical remedies are possible?”

 

In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Zuvela notes that the concept of eco-anxiety, “a term used to describe chronic distress and fear in response to environmental harm”, has become a recognised psychological condition.

 

She cites the algal bloom crisis, the avian flu crisis, and the currently burgeoning El Niño weather pattern as elements of the environmental polycrisis. We might add the deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon basin, the recent flood disaster in Nepal, and the drying-up of the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe to the point where they are no longer navigable by the barges essential to the transportation of goods. The list is endless.

Leaves: Eco-Anxiety, installation view; photo, Sam Roberts @samrophoto

 

The rapid acceleration and devastating impact of environmental damage that is reported in news bulletins is indeed disturbing, although, as Greta Thunberg suggests in her comprehensive and illuminating compilation The Climate Book (Penguin Random House, 2022), the news media have not adequately presented the climate crisis as a crisis, thereby allowing the public to remain ignorant of its extent and urgency for too long. The list may be endless, but we have been unable to appreciate fully its scale and impact.

 

The failure of government and business world-wide to take the necessary tough decisions to limit the damage and to develop strategies for adaptation to the climate change that has already occurred is itself a source of anxiety. How might voters react to the environmental culture wars exemplified by federal opposition leader Angus Taylor’s proposal to “repeal a raft of emission reduction and renewable energy policies” (Guardian Australia, 23 September 2026)?

 

This immersive exhibition brings together the diverse work of seven artists to address Zuvela’s question. They include Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Mirning, Wirangu and Kokatha artist Bryce Cawte, who is concerned to spread traditional knowledge of plants and their uses. His Coolamons; Words; Eucalyptus Oil (2026) comprises coolamons containing leaves and nuts which viewers can handle to gain a sensory appreciation of them, and he also exhibits eucalyptus leaves in jars of oil. Danni Zuvela sees Cawte’s work as a necessary pathway into the exhibition and says it, “…affirms the possibility that care for Country can take a practical form — a form that is widely accessible, and achievable.”

Bryce Cawte, Eucalyptus leaves, glass jars, oil, 2026 (detail);

Photo, Sam Roberts @samrophoto

 

Wangkumara artist Crista Bradshaw’s Bulina bunguandro nani (That one fell down from that gum tree) 2026, comprises piles of eucalyptus leaves placed around the gallery, again creating a powerful sensory experience, and decals representing eucalyptus leaves applied to ACE’s front window to refer to the archiving and overwriting of eucalypts by colonists. Like Cawte, Bradshaw highlights the need for the restoration of native species and the importance of the eucalypt in Indigenous culture.

 

Jingwei Bu uses the tea ceremony as a performative and meditative practice. Her installation Temples of Time (2026) includes an enclosure comprising canvas boards stained with the black tea she uses in tea ceremonies and another curtained enclosure made from Chinese painting silk which is also stained with black tea. In the first enclosure, she conducts performances with individual audience members and on the floor below the second is an arrangement of dried, used tea leaves, the residue of tea ceremonies.

 Artist Jingwei Bu (right) in performance with writer, curator and performance artist Michaela Bear in the Chronic workshop held as part of the public program of Leaves: Eco-Anxiety; photo, Lana Adams

 

At the Chronic performance workshop held on 12 September, Jingwei demonstrated her one-to-one performance piece Tea no Tea, which is conducted silently but with no tea, cups or pots — she mimics the gestures of pouring and offering tea, a Buddhist-inspired, ritualised act of anxiety-reduction that emphasises awareness of self.

 

Emiko Artemis also conducts one-to-one interactions with audience members in which she encourages participants to release their emotional burdens by entering a mediative state, naming their troubling environmental issue and briefly committing it to paper. These written statements are collected for subsequent incineration, thus symbolically releasing the participants’ troubles.

 

Stephanie Doddridge’s expansive body of artwork arises from her collaboration with bio-remediation organisation Bio-R, and her artwork, comprising installation and video, depicts Bio-R’s ecological restoration process. As well as the removal of introduced plant species, her work also addresses the displacement of the First Nations community from the location where the restoration is taking place. Doddridge has a parallel exhibition at the Museum of Economic Botany at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens.

 

ACE’s exhibition Leaves: Eco-Anxiety thus approaches Danni Zuvela’s question “what practical, cultural or mystical remedies are possible?” in several ways: by transmitting knowledge of the ecosystem, encouraging acts of restoration, acknowledging and sharing embodied feelings concerning the environment, and promoting cooperative action and mutual support.

 

Exhibition viewers become participants in processes that are intended to release stress and inspire optimism, and artists’ and audience members’ interaction stimulates a shared appreciation of the eco-crisis and of their own and each other’s feelings about it. Rather than seeing environmental degradation in abstract, statistical terms (are we at 1.5 degrees yet?) we experience our predicament collectively and think about how we might respond.

 

In her insightful book I Eat the Stars (Penguin Random House, 2026), which, like this exhibition, is intended to give us courage to face the polycrisis, Sarah Wilson asks, “Is it appropriate that we be making art when the world around us is suffering and disintegrating?” Her unequivocal answer is ‘yes’. Wilson quotes poet Teju Cole: “The artist raises a palm as if to say hush and listen and let’s be still.”

 

Chris Reid

 

When: 11 Sep to 5 Dec

Where: Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, Morphett Street, Adelaide

More info: https://ace.gallery/whats-on/exhibitions/leaves-eco-anxiety

Performances and artists’ talks are scheduled throughout the exhibition season.

 

 

 

 

Bryce Cawte,

Coolamons; Words; Eucalyptus Oil, 2026 (detail);

Photo, Sam Roberts @samrophoto