Art After Dark: Silent Spring by Hayden Fowler

The ART AFTER DARK program continues to light up the Winter sky on the Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen. Throughout July, in alignment with Casey Cornucopia, we are exhibiting Silent Spring by acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Hayden Fowler. 

_{Header Image: Silent Spring, Hayden Fowler 2009/17. Still from SD digital video converted from Super 8 film; sound}

Silent Spring  

_{2009/17. SD digital video converted from Super 8 film; sound; 5:14 duration.}  

I was fortunate to have a special place to return to as a child, the base of a majestic volcanic cone where the streams and rivers radiated out to the sea. The land had been virtually denuded, million year old forests reduced to pasture in a few decades, which clung to the bones of the landscape like the Emperor’s new clothes. A remnant spring still bubbled up clean ancient water, while an upstream chemical spill brought a mass death to even more ancient eels that still haunted the remnant waterways. 

These early experiences in landscape was the start of a life-long focus that has been the basis of my practice. My formative experience of nature was one composed of ghosts, remnants, invasive new species and altered toxic chemistries. While the landscape reverberated in the silence of devastation and loss, it contained all the elements of an emerging future ecosystem, natural processes of evolution and adaptation continued amongst the wreckage. 

Referencing the legacy of environmental writer Rachel Carson, the video work ‘Silent Spring’ depicts an isolated corner of a depleted landscape, where the skies and waters are marked by chemical change. A small colony of alien-looking hyacinths - symbols of peace, beauty and sorrow - bloom and struggle beside a bubbling sulphurous pink spring, their own bodies infused with the colour of this new eco-chemical system. 

- Hayden Fowler 

_{Super 8 film and transfer to digital video: Hayden Fowler 
Sound design and production: Hayden Fowler and Reuben Alexander. 
Sound recording and engineering: Reuben Alexander}

About Hayden Fowler

Born 1973 Te Awamutu, New Zealand. Lives and works Sydney, Australia and Berlin, Germany. 

Provoked by the rupture of colonial histories and the global impacts of industrial capitalist practices, Hayden Fowler’s melancholic and poetic artworks are a continuing lament for both past and future and the ongoing entanglements between systemic violence, humanity and the natural world. His ideas relate the destruction of the environment to the degradation of culture and denaturing of humanity. While his works and research explore the historical influences leading to this juncture, as well as his projections and propositions of imagined futures. 

Fowler’s methodology involves long periods of multidisciplinary research in the development of immersive and conceptually layered works - depicting scenes ranging from pristine futuristic interiors, to apocalyptic/ post-human landscapes and speculative regenerative ecologies. Within these spaces, choreographies between plants, animals and technology unfold, weaving mysticism, architecture, technology and life forms into strange new systems.  

Fowler holds a Master of Fine Arts and an earlier degree in Science, originally trained as a biologist, majoring in ecology and animal behaviour. He exhibits nationally and internationally and his work is held in a number of public and private collections. Recent exhibitions include Klima (climate) (2021), Urbane Künste Ruhr, Germany; The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100 (2019), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; Australia. Antipodean Stories (2020), PAC Contemporary Art Pavilion, Milan, Italy; Broken Romance (2019): Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany. 

www.haydenfowler.net