Highlighted works in this space discuss the use of water and nature in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, the reclamation of cultural practice and exploring the impacts of artificial items on nature. 

Tagai is the name of the constellation used by Torres Strait Islander people to navigate the islands of the Torres Strait. Tagai also dictates the timing of the practices associated with planting, harvesting and hunting. The bamboo used to create this work was collected by Mabo and her family from the grounds of James Cook University in Townsville. Her father planted this bamboo when he was a groundskeeper at the university, and, as a child, Mabo would often assist her father in caring for the plants.

The constellation of Tagai takes the form of a man standing in a canoe with his hand holding a spear and pointing. The Southern Cross is located in the left hand of Tagai and within this (at the bottom left) is Koiki, the star named after Mabo’s father, Eddie Koiki Mabo, on 3 June 2015. This dedication marked the twenty-third anniversary of the historic Mabo decision, whereby the High Court of Australia overturned the doctrine of terra nullius (meaning a land belonging to no one). Gail Mabo explains:

This story was told to me as a child by my father, Eddie Koiki Mabo, as he was told by his father, Benny Mabo, about the stories of the Torres Straits Islands. The story of Tagai, which is still told to the young people today, is considered an important aspect of daily life. Tagai is important for navigation, as the Southern Cross (Tagai’s left hand) points to the south. We use Tagai to navigate through the Torres Strait from island to island. Tagai also tells the Islanders when to plant their gardens, when to hunt turtles and dugong, when the monsoon season arrives, when the winds change and many other important aspects of daily life.

Fiona Hall’s Cell culture, a collection of animals and plants, is constructed from clear glass beads and white Tupperware containers, all housed within a large museum-like cabinet. Quirky and whimsical, Hall’s creatures and plants invite us to consider the world around us and the ways by which human intervention is affecting the environment. In their museological case, evocative of the many cases of taxidermy and specimens on display in museums around the world, these flora and fauna allude to humankind’s interest in the natural world and our desire to tame, control and study this world, often to the detriment of living organisms and ecologies.

Ashlee Murray is a shell-stringer from the northwest coast of lutruwita/Tasmania. She is part of the Dolly Dalrymple and Mansel family tree, with ancestral connections to the Furneaux Islands, where shell-stringing has been part of the culture for thousands of years. Shell-stringing is one of the oldest continuous cultural practices in lutruwita/Tasmania, having been handed down through generations of women for thousands of years. Long before invasion, maireener shell necklaces were created by Tasmanian Aboriginal people for adornment and trade, and as tokens of honour. The European explorers who visited Tasmania remarked on the beauty of these pieces, with early drawings and photographs of Aboriginal people illustrating how shells were worn as necklaces, headdresses and armbands. The styles and designs of shell necklaces have evolved since colonisation.

On occasions, tools such as needles and cotton string have replaced kangaroo sinew, making the process of stringing fine shells easier and leading to the inclusion of toothie and rice shells. Shells also began to be strung closer together, while the length of the necklaces have increased from neck size to the longer strings often seen today.

Palawa stringers learn every step of the making process, from the collecting of the shells to the cleaning and stringing. This skill is passed down from the Elders, woman to woman. It takes great skill and a deep connection to sea country to locate and harvest the shells. In recent years maireener shells have become increasingly rare, as the warming of the oceans impacts on the kelp forests in which they live.

The terror and the sublime of the ocean take centre stage in this gallery, where the focus is on the vast stories of journeying and migration and where water becomes something to be respected and sometimes feared. James Shaw’s and Charles Hill’s paintings on this wall depict an important story in the development of early South Australia, the wreck of the steamship SS Admella off the coast in 1859. Due to the treacherous sea conditions, only twenty-four of the 113 passengers and crew on board survived. The loss of the Admella – named for the three cities between which the ship travelled, Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston – is just one of the many shipwrecks that characterised early migration and travel to South Australia. Sea voyages, the only way to traverse the vast distances from Europe, could be very dangerous, with extremes of weather, disease, cramped and uncomfortable conditions.

Johnny Bulunbulun’s bark canoe offers insight into the long history of connection between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the water. Constructed from bark and string, the canoe is a simple and effective tool for negotiating waterways – the mangroves and estuaries – for transport and fishing. Sitting low in the water and creating little wake, these vessels are perfect for catching fish and other creatures.

The Wine Dark Sea takes its title from an epithet contained in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, written by the classical Greek poet Homer. Homer uses the phrase to refer to the threat of stormy, bloody seas and the dangers of a treacherous crossing. Pinchuk’s trans-historic installation owes much to the story of Odysseus and his embattled attempts to reach his island home of Ithaca. Pinchuk’s installation is comprised of twenty-three massed marble columns of varying heights and sizes and in five varieties of Italian marble – Verde Alpi, Terra Rossa, Frattale, Picasso Nero and Rosso Levanto – each selected for its particular properties. The white-flecked green marble of the Verde Alpi resembles wind-whipped ocean; the iron oxide runs through the Terra Rossa like a seam of blood; and black eddies whirl through the Picasso Nero.

With her meticulous carving on the marble columns, Pinchuk has interspersed passages from Homer’s Odyssey, from the eighth century BCE, with contemporary transcripts of leaked cables and notes from investigative journalists relating to Australia’s offshore detention centres at Nauru and Manus Island. Although centuries apart, the words from these disparate sources painfully echo each other. The urgent and desperate situations of Homer’s Odysseus and twenty-first-century asylum-seekers are indistinguishable. Pinchuk describes the installation as ‘a meditation on ideas of home and of migration’. She characterises Homer’s Odyssey as the first migrant novel focused on the state of being in near-permanent exile and the notion of seeking refuge.

The way visitors are treated and welcomed, offered or denied sanctuary is an expression of hospitality and humanity. This timeless work speaks to the universal struggle of displaced people in their search for sanctuary across often-perilous ‘wine dark seas’.

The ancient story of Narcissus uses the natural properties of water to invoke a moral tale. Ovid’s Metamorphosis tells the story of Narcissus, a young man of great beauty who rejects all offers of love from men and women, instead falling in love with a reflection of himself. Nolan’s story of Narcissus takes inspiration from Australia’s dramatic landscapes. Unlike European depictions of Narcissus, which largely feature still, highly reflective bodies of water such as lakes and pools, Nolan’s water is a fast-flowing waterfall in which Narcissus is unlikely to see much of a reflection. (For a contrasting image, see Negri’s Narcissus in gallery 15.)

This striking circle watercolour by Kumantjai H. Pareroultja was first presented as part of Tarnanthi 2015, where it was displayed alongside a series of vibrant skirts designed by artists from Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Art Centre.

Created within the collaborative Namatjira Collection project, the circle works reimagine the renowned Ntaria (Hermannsburg) watercolour tradition pioneered by Albert Namatjira. Pareroultja and his fellow artists captured the vast, open landscapes of Central Australia in a new format, painting in the round to evoke the feeling of lying at the centre of Country, with trees, grasses and mountain ranges rising up towards the sky.

These images were then transformed into skirts that celebrated both painting and performance, bringing the Tjuritja (West MacDonnell Ranges) to life through movement. In combining watercolours with fashion, the project honoured past generations while sharing culture and Country with new audiences, ensuring these traditions continue to inspire the next.

A mysterious land, no.6, is one of a series of works the artist, Guan Wei, produced in response to his time spent on a three-week camp in western Arnhem Land, working and exchanging ideas with five senior Indigenous artists. This was the artist's first experience of the Australian ‘great outdoors’, having spent all his time in coastal Australian cities. His experience in northwestern Australia left a profound impression on him:

I attempted to combine the essence of both Aboriginal culture and ancient Chinese philosophy using an ‘oriental’ background and my experience of the Australian land. In this way, it contains a peaceful Australian forest, the yellow land of Darwin, huge ant hills, Australian animals and elongated white clouds, to which I have added a mythological creature, Pan, and seal stamps. My intention is to represent the mystery, the sheer beauty of the forest and the great forces of nature that hold us in awe and feed our reveries. Through this work, I want to reveal the disharmonious relationship between nature and us, now living in a highly urbanised world, in order that people might reacquaint themselves with nature, embrace nature, and even return to nature.

Glenda León (b.1976) is a Cuban conceptual artist who lives and works in Spain and Havana. She works across many mediums, including video, installation, objects and photography, often exploring the relationship between nature and humanity and the artificial and the natural.

Through the Murmullos de la Tierra series, León expands on her interest in sound, creating physical representations of the sounds that were carried into space on NASA’s Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, the echoes of which continue to reverberate through space. Her work translates the intangible sound waves into the solid tangibility of clay. León explains:

Although the records have been sent into space, it is us who must urgently listen to the planet. We seem completely ignorant of what Earth needs to be healthy. To heal our planet, we must first listen to it. In a way, this is an attempt to bring those sounds back home to Earth by recreating them in the element that compounds earth itself: clay.

Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry were founding members of the important artistic community, the Bloomsbury Group, which first assembled in Bell’s family home in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The fundamental ethos of this group was to remove the artificial constructs that separated fine art, decorative art and the applied arts. Bell, Fry and other members of the group believed that art could, and should be, included in all aspects of life and thus applied to any surface. Roger and Helen Fry’s cabinet is so beautifully painted that it becomes easy to forget that this is in fact a useful object with a purpose beyond the purely aesthetic.

Bell’s View of Venice and Roger and Helen Fry’s Trevelyan cabinet take profoundly different approaches to the representation and purpose of water. Bell’s is an unfinished work, painted en plein air adjacent to a Venetian canal, the water being a ubiquitous accoutrement in any portrait of Venice. The Frys’ cabinet on the other hand makes water the main character, with the mythical creatures dancing and frolicking across its waves.

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota is a performance and installation artist who uses wool, blood, metal and earth to make her works. She is widely celebrated for her large-scale installations, made using string, which is sometimes connected to everyday objects such as keys, windows, dresses and boats.

In addition to the dense mass of red wool, which forms a three-dimensional labyrinth, the installation includes a cluster of bronze and plaster casts of the artist’s and family members’ hands and feet. The artist describes the process of making the work:

In making the work, sometimes the string gets tangled, or loses tension, or is cut, much like human relationships. Relationships can become tangled, lost or severed. Red string symbolises the body, blood or relationships between humans. There is an expression in Japanese, akai-ito de musu bareru, which means ‘two people whose lives are bound together with a red string’; it describes human connection.

Covering the theme of metamorphosis, many works in gallery 16 explore the ideas central to the Nature Festival. John William Waterhouse’s Circe 1892 invites us to watch the poison as it flows into the sea, irrevocably changing Scylla from the once-beautiful maiden into a horrifying sea monster. As the poison enters the water, Scylla's transformation is evidenced by the swirling water, which assumes an unnatural lurid hue.

Bronwyn Oliver’s delicate Eddy 1993 transforms the transient into the physical, with her ‘eddy’ of air or water – like a miniature tornado cone – imparting the appearance of an ephemeral and fragile object, delicately woven together. In reality, the work is robustly constructed from patinated copper and has a little risk of damage or destruction.

Designed by Marc Newson, Cloisonné Blue Chair (central plinth) is from a body of furniture (2017–) that utilises the metalwork technique of cloisonné. A labour-intensive enamelling technique, cloisonné employs differently coloured vitreous enamel, held in place or separated by strips of metal wire and then kiln-fired. This technique dates to the ancient world and is perhaps most famously known in the context of the decorative arts produced in East Asia. This body of work reflects Newson's original training as a jeweller: cloisonné is normally used in jewellery and small metalwork objects.

Despite his ambitious idea to incorporate this technique into furniture, Newson struggled to locate workshops in China capable of producing this technique on a larger scale. Newson explained:

When I went to China, I couldn't find anyone to do it. Ironically the process was almost dying out ... So we had to find certain individuals who could recruit and retrain people. We built this factory and got it to a point where we could produce these crazy shapes … There are 30 people executing steps along the way, doing the enamel … it's a mad process.