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Who's Afraid of Colour?  An exhibition of Indigenous Womens' Art in Australia shows a wide diversity of materials, styles, techniques and colours that connect with the environment and indigenous spirituality.

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Who's Afraid of Colour?  An exhibition of Indigenous Womens' Art in Australia shows a wide diversity of materials, styles, techniques and colours that connect with the environment and indigenous spirituality.

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"This is not a feminist exhibition," curator Judith Ryan tells me as we take the stairs down to the ground level at the National Gallery of Victoria, after seeing a preview of Who's Afraid of Colour? It is, however, an exhibition that features only the work of Indigenous women, and this is a statement in itself.

In a year in which female artists were underrepresented in the major exhibitions and retrospectives - and the NGV, in particular, came under fire for its lack of support for female artists - it's heartening for the gallery to end the year with an all-female, Indigenous Australian show.

Who's Afraid of Colour? draws on the NGV's own collection and features more than 200 contemporary artworks by 118 female artists. The NGV is calling the exhibition an "unprecedented survey of Indigenous Australian women's art."

The gallery started collecting Indigenous art in the mid 1980s. The exhibition, which runs over six gallery spaces, features work never displayed before, much of it collected in the last three or four years, says Ryan.

Although not all the work had been hung when Guardian Australia visited, the pieces displayed were exciting, diverse and bold. The artists range from women living in traditional communities to those in cities. Some of the work is textural - baskets, mats and baby carriers - while others are paintings and installations.

"We have a vast cross-section of work," says Ryan, who has been working with Indigenous art since the 1970s. "We're showing women who have trained in glass [and have work by] Maree Clarke from Melbourne who does photography and installation. There's also a lot going on in the Torres Strait - we have three woven body sculptures, plus jewellery and feather headdresses from Cape York."

There are also two rooms displaying batiks - cloth that has been dyed using wax to create patterns - as well as early drawings from Fitzroy Crossing and works that reference ancestral events, including a giant eel trap.

Work by Indigenous women has been traditionally overlooked by the art establishment, says Ryan. In 1981, for example, there were no female artists included in the Aboriginal Australia exhibition, a massive show at NGV featuring 321 works from Indigenous artists.

The anthropologists who were responsible for collecting fibre objects, such as baskets or mats, often did not acknowledge women as the creators of the objects.

The artists were "not dignified with either a name or a voice," says Ryan.

Ryan dates the ascendancy of female Indigenous artists to around the year 2000, "after women's art practice was acknowledged internationally in 1997 when Emily Kam Kngwarray, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson represented Australia at the Venice Biennale."

Many people assume Indigenous art begins and ends with dot paintings, but there is an incredible variety of artistic styles on display in this exhibition. Take for example Julie Dowling's stunning painting, Goodbye White Fella Religion, that uses earth pigments and blood on canvas, and depicts a man lying on the ground in either torment or ecstasy. Or the work of Jenny Crompton, whose hanging sculpture Sea Country Spirits is so beautiful, it's difficult to resist the temptation to touch it.

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Goodbye White Fella Religion by Julie Dowling, 1992. Photograph: Julie Dowling / VISCOPY

Crompton's sculpture consists of 32 individual hanging works, which are made from recycled copper wire, shells, feathers, kangaroo bones, grass tree fronds and paint.

"My art practice focuses on themes that explore the environment and Indigenous culture of my country, the Wadawurrung country of the Surf Coast and Bellarine Peninsula," Crompton told Guardian Australia. "Part of my process is walking the land and respectfully gathering natural materials, which allows me to reconnect, listen and interpret an essence of my culture and an Aboriginal spirituality through the making of sculpture and paintings."

Consider also Maree Clarke, who recreates ceremonial objects held in museums which are no longer made in Indigenous communities. Her majestic kangaroo tooth necklace is part of the exhibition.

"With the information that I gather, I pass this knowledge on to the next generation through art mentoring programs," says Clarke. "I also like to think about new ways to tell our stories through new media."

The work in the exhibition - particularly the woven, fibre objects - may not seem like political works of art, but "art is political, life is political," says Ryan. "Some of the works are more overtly political than others, but it's a political statement for an artist to still live on country, and an assertion that she wants to stay on country. If she keeps weaving from material found on land, that is a statement of continuity of culture and ways of looking at the world."
* Who's Afraid of Colour? is showing at Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 16 December to 17 April Topics

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Long overlooked, Indigenous women's art takes centre stage in Melbourne exhibition

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"This is not a feminist exhibition," curator Judith Ryan tells me as we take the stairs down to the ground level at the National Gallery of Victoria, after seeing a preview of Who's Afraid of Colour? It is, however, an exhibition that features only the work of Indigenous women, and this is a statement in itself.

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Lisa creates projects in 'third-world' slums where water canals are polluted. With the inhabitants she cleans them up and plants remediating plants and community gardens.

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From Wastewater to Deep Beauty | Lisa Shaw | TEDxFindhorn

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Artist and Photographer Lisa Shaw talks about the blending of art, nature and technology and how it influences her work in ecological restoration of dangerous waterways around the world. From her childhood as the daughter of a sewerage engineer to how she teaches her son that there is no rubbish in nature, Lisa's stimulating talk and photographs have something for everybody.

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Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison on the Role of the Artist is Troubled Times.

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Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison on the Role of the Artist is Troubled Times.

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"I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art."

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This article is part of The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Ad Policy

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, "How are you?" And instead of "Oh, fine-and you?", I blurt out the truth: "Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can't seem to work, to write; it's as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I've begun. I've never felt this way before, but the election...." I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: "No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work-not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!"

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

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The list-which covers centuries, not just the last one-is long. A short sample will include Paul Robeson, Primo Levi, Ai Weiwei, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lillian Hellman, Salman Rushdie, Herta Müller, Walter Benjamin. An exhaustive list would run into the hundreds.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art: the censorship and book-burning of unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists. This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive power to flourish. Their plan is simple:

1. Select a useful enemy-an "Other"-to convert rage into conflict, even war.

2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists.

3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

The Nation could never have existed or flourished in 1940s Spain, or 2014 Syria, or apartheid South Africa, or 1930s Germany. And the reason is clear. It was born in the United States in 1865, the year of Lincoln's assassination, when political division was stark and lethal-during, as my friend said, times of dread. But no prince or king or dictator could interfere successfully or forever in a country that seriously prized freedom of the press. This is not to say there weren't elements that tried censure, but they could not, over the long haul, win. The Nation, with its history of disruptive, probing, intelligent essays sharing wide space equally with art criticism, reviews, poetry and drama, is as crucial now as it has been for 150 years.

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No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

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This article is part of The Nation's 150th Anniversary Special Issue . Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Howard Zinn and many more, here. Ad Policy Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

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Margaret Wertheimer on the Coral Reef Project.

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Margaret Wertheimer on the Coral Reef Project.

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In this TED she explains how she and her sister created a series of art projects that joined together a math concept in three dimensions and a group of women bent on saving the coral reefs armed only with crochet hooks.

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Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math of coral

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Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation.

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The Institute of Figuring: the Crochet Coral Project.

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The Institute of Figuring: the Crochet Coral Project.

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How do mathematics, a women's almost-forgotten craft and a dying coral reef fit together? It's art

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The Crochet Coral Reef is a project of the Institute For Figuring (IFF). All texts and photographs on this site are copyright the IFF and may not be used without permission.

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Wim Wenders' documentary on the photography and forest regeneration projects of Sebastião Salgado...truly an amazing film.

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The Salt of the Earth - Official Trailer

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The world-famous photographer explains how he came to start on this project for regenerating the forest and photographing what he believes we must save. The result is impressive: 2.5 million trees from 200 species to regenerate the ecosystem on and around the farm where he grew up in Brazil.

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The silent drama of photography | Sebastião Salgado

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Through his photography he wants people around the world to join in a great discussion on sustainability.

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British artist Persephone Pearl and theatre group Feral organised the first Remembrance Day for Extinct Species. These events combat cultural amnesia and allow people to express healthy grief.

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In early 2010, artist, activist and mother, Persephone Pearl, headed to the Bristol Museum. Like many concerned about the fate of the planet, she was in despair over the failed climate talks in Copenhagen that winter. She sat on a bench and looked at a stuffed animal behind glass: a thylacine. Before then, she'd never heard of the marsupial carnivore that went extinct in 1936.

"Here was this beautiful mysterious lost creature locked in a glass case," she said. "It struck me suddenly as unbearably undignified. And I had this sudden vision of smashing the glass, lifting the body out, carrying the thylacine out into the fields, stroking its body, speaking to it, washing it with my tears, and burying it by a river so that it could return to the earth."

Pearl felt grief, deep grief, over the loss of a creature she'd never once seen in life, a species that had been shot to extinction because European settlers had deemed it vermin. Yet, how do we grieve for extinct species when there are no set rituals, no extinction funerals, no catharsis for the pain caused by a loss that in many ways is simply beyond human comprehension? We have been obliterating species for over ten thousand years - beginning with the megafauna of the Pleistocene like woolly rhinos, short-faced bears and giant sloths - yet we have no way of mourning them.

Still, Pearl didn't push the grief under or ignore it. Instead, she sought to share it. In 2011 Pearl, who is the co-director of the arts group, ONCA, and the theatre group Feral in Brighton, helped organise the first ever Remembrance Day for Lost Species. Held every November 30th, it's since become a day for activists, artists and mourners to find creative ways to share their grief for extinct species - and reinvigorate their love for the natural world.

"We hope the Remembrance events will function as funerals for humans do," Rachel Porter, a co-founder of Remembrance Day for Lost Species and a movement therapist, said. "Such rituals are ancient, embedded within us. We are just placing this common ritual into an unfamiliar context."

Most of these events are not large - they are not thousands of people marching on government buildings - but more like the number of people who would attend a funeral for a loved one. They are communal and largely intimate events, full of things you might expect and others you might not: such as burning pyres, chanting, poetry reading, bell tolling and processionals.

But there are no rules to the Remembrance Day for Lost Species and anyone can start a public event or hold a private ceremony. This year, they are going on all over the world, including a dinner for the dodo in London, a poetry reading in Berlin, and a remembrance ritual for the thylacine outside of Brisbane, Australia.

Graphic designer and art therapist Julia Peddie, who is hosting the thylacine ritual in Australia this year, said she remembers as a child first learning about how humans wiped out the dodo - and how the knowledge crushed her.

"I can only imagine how children feel now, witnessing such enormous losses, and wonder if they are desensitising in order to cope," she said. "Remembrance Day for Lost Species provides an opportunity for children and adults to connect with their grief, and in doing so, reclaim a part of themselves."

The vitality of grief

But let's be honest, many of us probably find the idea of attending a funeral or walking in a processional for a vanished species a little foolish. It may even make us feel something more profound: vulnerable. But Pearl said this is only to be expected.

"If grieving for a lost person is difficult, grieving for ecosystems and species is entirely novel and challenging."

A memorial to extinct species outside Whitehall in 2010 created by Persephone Pearl, Jessie Martelhof, and Thomas Daniell. Photograph: Persephone Pearl

She said that as a global society we have lost the knowledge of how to grieve even for our closest loved ones, quoting teacher and author Stephen Jenkinson who writes that our society is "death phobic and grief illiterate."

"We struggle to talk about death and dying," Pearl said. "It is seen as a terrible thing, to be avoided at all costs. We are afraid of upsetting people, and of awkward conversations."

But at what cost? According to Porter, our inability to show grief - or even allow ourselves to feel it - may lead to mental illness.

"The grief might become misplaced if it's not recognised and misguided grief could be destructive, it could manifest as depression or anxiety."

We need to imagine and invent new rituals for the Anthropocene.

Persephone Pearl

In contrast, displaying grief can result in catharsis. In an emotional process first described by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago, pent up, intense feelings are allowed safe release through ritual. Afterwards, mourners are able to move forward, maybe even with more wisdom than before.

"Actual grief is hardly practiced today," Megan Hollingsworth, a poet and founder of the collaborative art project ex·tinc·tion wit·ness, said. "If it were, children would neither be murdered in war nor would they go hungry and homeless in the streets of the world's 'wealthiest' nations. Water would be protected. The desires of 'grown' men and women would not ever trump the needs of any single child, let alone whole communities."

Hollingsworth, also one of the founders of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, will be holding a bell tolling ceremony in Montana on the 30th.

Tear your hair for the extinct

But grief doesn't occur only when we lose loved ones. Ask anyone who has seen a local forest they once played in as a child demolished for another cookie-cutter development or has watched as fewer bees and butterflies show up in their garden each summer. Or ask any conservationist who has to witness year-after-year as the species they work with slowly vanish, ask any marine biologist about coral reefs or any Arctic biologist about sea ice. Grief can extend far beyond our human parochialism.

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A ceremony for the Caribbean monk seal, which was last seen in 1952. From Remembrance Day for Lost Species in 2012. Photograph: Ben Ellsworth

"We realised that there was a hunger for a way of grieving ecological loss through ritual," said Porter who in 2011 directed a Funeral for Lost Species through her group, Feral Theatre. This was an outdoor theatrical performance in a churchyard that included various traditional forms of mourning and tilted between somber and whimsical.

Grief can provide a pathway for taking responsibility, and making a commitment to take action.

Julia Peddie

Porter believes many people are simply "stuck in a kind of denial" when it comes to extinction, biodiversity loss and environmental crises.

"If we face it honestly and fully we have to face our own collective shadow, our out-of-control destructive urges and acts. These are terrible, terrifying things to face alone," she said.

Part of this denial is also due to our growing disconnect from nature.

"Many humans now solely interact with domesticated animals and plants. Some have no experience whatsoever of intact forest, field, and aquatic community. The total loss of other community members, their families, and life affirming ways then is an utterly distant abstraction," Hollingsworth said. "Yet in grief, as in love, humans are wired for intimacy. "

According to the founders of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, grieving in a ritualised ceremony removes our isolation from other mourners - we are after all grieving communally - and cuts through the denial.

"For those in denial bearing witness to acts of remembrance and honouring reminds them non-aggressively of something that they are pushing away. That is why making these rituals public is so very important," Porter said.

In the end such rituals may help people transform their perfectly understandable anger - which is "connected to the disregard and destruction of the natural world," according to Porter - into something ultimately productive.

Providing a real outlet for grief could help people finally take action and change the world for the better.

"Potentially, in our sadness, we can vow not to continue to let it happen, and acknowledge the role we humans are playing in causing the extinctions," Peddie said. "Grief can provide a pathway for taking responsibility, and making a commitment to take action."

Such rituals also allow us to view extinction in a novel way. So much of the information we receive about extinctions and biodiversity decline today comes from science, not from personal experience in the wild. And while science is necessary, it is often represented in wonky papers or press release that are bloodless, cold, even inhuman - a recitation of facts rather than a proper elegy for the lost.

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A processional for the great auk during the Remembrance Day for Lost Species in 2011. The great auk went extinct in 1844 after the last two known animals were killed violently by men seeking their eggs. The species was pushed to extinction by killing for its feathers, eggs and even to use as fishing bait. Photograph: Persephone Pearl

"Telling the stories of recently extinct species is a way of capturing people's imaginations to this end," said Pearl. "It's not science or statistics, it's history, it's real life - and in an age of cultural amnesia, storytelling inspired by historical events is a way to learn lessons from the past."

But many probably fear that allowing themselves to feel the grief - really feel it - will result in a personal collapse. Hollingsworth said that an environmental studies professor once told her: "'I can't think of this as grief. That would be endless.'"

But this is "where the misconception lies," according to Hollingsworth. Grieving doesn't bring endless suffering, but healing and health.

"What happens when I don't grieve someone's death? What does it mean not to feel or express sorrow when someone passes unnecessarily due to my negligence? Just the thought of this is chilling to me as the sociopath is brought to mind," she said.

Grief can be funny too

This doesn't mean such events have to be sombre and drowned in tears. No emotion is wrong, according to the founders of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species. They are not afraid to throw humour and whimsy into their rituals.

If you can make people laugh, you are halfway to love. You can take people to deep places.

Persephone Pearl

"Often at human funerals people share funny stories about the dead person and it gives a relief, a release from weight of loss, and it can bring a celebratory feel," said Porter.

Laughter can be incredibly powerful, even during a ritual mourning.

"Humour allows us to softly break through denial and isolation, to damp down the tempers fire, to create space in between the agony, the fear, the chaos," said Porter.

Recently, Pearl attended the Stories of the Anthropocene Festival in Stockholm where she held a remembrance ceremony for the thylacine. Attendees were asked to share their stories about extinction - but first they had to step through a glitter curtain.

"If you can make people laugh, you are halfway to love. You can take people to deep places. You can encourage them to take risks," she said.

But sombreness is okay, too, the founders insist. It all depends on what you are hoping to create within the context of the ritual.

Grieving in the Anthropocene

Legend says the world's last thylacine died cold and alone. The story is that it was mistakenly locked out of its nighttime quarters at the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania during an unusually cold night in 1936. The animal, which was never even identified as a male or female, perished from exposure. That was 80 years ago this year.

While the last thylacine may not have actually died from the cold, it certainly died in a kind of loneliness that is almost impossible for humans - seven billion and rising - to comprehend. It was, after all, an endling. The last of its kind.

And yet do we barely remember it, let alone weep for it.

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A child visits the 'grave' of Bombus franklini, a bee that went extinct in 2006, during the Funeral for Lost Species. The memorial was made by Eri Meacock. Photograph: Abi Horn

Julia Peddie said the 80th Anniversary of the extinction of the thylacine "went fairly unnoticed in the mainstream media" even in its native Australia.

Despite little media around the anniversary, Australia still has a lot of "nostalgia" for the thylacine, said Peddie, to the extent that some people believe it still inhabits the wild lands of Tasmania.

Perhaps, this is a kind of denial in action, an inability to accept the extinction of what once was; a denial that may continue to allow Australians - and people around the world - to ignore the losses going on right in front of them.

Australia is an epicentre of extinction. It has the highest mammal loss of any country on Earth. Since European arrival, the country has lost at least 30 species of mammal. And another was lost just this year: the Bramble Cay melomys, the world's first mammal known to have gone extinct due to climate change.

"The stories of lost species remind us that things do end, they do die, that we are causing irrevocable and deeply distressing changes - but that the ending's not yet written for the stories of rhinoceros, of hedgehogs, of phytoplankton," said Pearl.

So, really, why don't we grieve for the passenger pigeon, the golden toad, or the Yangtze River dolphin? Or how about Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog which just vanished from the Earth in September? Why don't we rend our garments for the woolly mammoth, or tear our hair for the dodo or smear our windows with ash for the great moas that once roamed New Zealand? It can't hurt. It could only heal.

"We need to imagine and invent new rituals for the Anthropocene," said Pearl. "What would a memorial for the Caspian tiger or the elephant bird look like? A memorial for the Great Barrier Reef? For 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2?"

The age of the Anthropocene is an age of grief, put simply. Not showing, sharing or indeed feeling that grief will make it all the more unbearable. But a collective keening may be key to moving forward and creating a new society that fully respects and cherishes the millions of life forms that call this planet home.

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A memorial to the passenger pigeon on a beach in Wales by Emily Laurens in 2014. Photograph: Keely Clarke

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Why don't we grieve for extinct species?

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In early 2010, artist, activist and mother, Persephone Pearl, headed to the Bristol Museum. Like many concerned about the fate of the planet, she was in despair over the failed climate talks in Copenhagen that winter. She sat on a bench and looked at a stuffed animal behind glass: a thylacine.