What we learn when we stop talking and let art speak

Sydney Morning Herald

09-05-2025

A tree lies on its side like a sleeping giant, its roots suspended midair as if torn loose by a storm. But the tree is made of cardboard, and instead of the earthy scent of soil, I'm struck by something sweeter, mustier – the smell of packing boxes, of trying to make a home in a place that feels bare and unfamiliar. It's a ritual that defines an era marked by uncertainty for so many of us.
The sideways tree is Reflections/Habitations, a new sculpture by husband-and-wife duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan. It commands the first room of the Bundanon Art Museum, part o f Thinking Together: Exchanges with the Natural World. From a distance, the work appears grand and impassive. But up close, it reveals a wild intricacy – sculptures within a sculpture: a miniature sailboat, a nest of shredded paper, a single flower with corrugated petals. The tree may stand alone, yet it belongs to a larger network, shaped by patterns that often slip past our eyes.
Across from Reflections/Habitations, a monitor glides across the wall, playing a continuous stream of images: the rippled surface of water, a scrubby stretch of beach, the warm glow of sandstone. To make New Eyes – Old Country (2024), Robert Andrew, a Yawuru man from the Kimberley region, drew on a Bundanon residency, during which he gathered drone footage tracing the river's course. The kinetic video installation uses fragments of charcoal, collected from the site, to create marks and lines as it moves across the gallery wall, forming a cumulative drawing that slowly unfolds throughout the exhibition. The work suggests that to truly know a place takes time, and that certain forms of intimacy must be earned.
In the next room is Horse Power, a 2019 video work by Tina Stefanou – the result of three years spent in the company of retired horses at Jocklebeary Farm in regional Victoria. The horses circle one another, nudge noses, drift apart, then return. They wear chainmail, and the clang of metal becomes percussive, hypnotic, drawing viewers into their rhythms, a sense of time unbound by work, performance or achievement. These are elderly horses, their value diminished, according to cultural standards. Yet there is something quietly profound in the way they invite us into an invisible language, one we can feel and respond to, even if we lack the words to name it.
Thinking Together is about language as exchange – about how, when we stop shouting over one another, a different kind of dialogue can emerge. There are forms of communication that don't rely on verbs or nouns, our often broken tools of expression, but instead draw power from what can't be said. In Reflections/Habitations, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan evoke this idea through participation: visitors are invited to contribute to the sculpture, which references balikbayan boxes – packages filled with gifts, sent between Filipino migrants and their families as gestures of love and connection across distance.
Near Horse Power, opposite a radiant painting – Kalyu (2014), created by the Martu community to map the intricate, interconnected water systems near Karlamilyi National Park in Western Australia and protest uranium mining – is Comfort Zone (2021), a video work by Thai-New Zealand artist Sorawit Songsataya. The piece centres on the kotuku, or Eastern great egret – an endangered species common in Thailand's rice fields, but rarely seen in Aotearoa, the edge of its climatic range. Blending nature documentary-style footage with a disquieting voiceover, the work poses existential questions about place, identity and what it means to belong in the universe.
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The world, as once mapped by dominant systems, seems to be breaking down – but other kinds of knowledge are beginning to interrupt this terrain, if we can learn to tune into them. In Growth in the Shadows (2025), Keg D'Souza turns to mycelium networks – thread-like structures that wrap around tree roots, allowing fungi and plants to communicate, to exchange resources. In a Wardian case – a colonial-era terrarium – D'Souza has created a tiny ecosystem, gathered from Bundanon: moss, mushrooms and logs. The logs are fitted with clips that translate these silent conversations, the ones happening all around us, every day, just beneath the surface.