Monsters by Edwin Harris-Faull & blak & (un)bothered by Jayda Wilson.

For the Huon

During his residency in the World Heritage rainforests of southwest Tasmania, and under the guidance of Mark Valenzuela, Edwin Harris-Faull entered a landscape shaped by deep time. There, amongst the slow breath of ancient ecologies, he sought out the majestic Huon pine – living witnesses to epochs of history. e Edwin’s ceramics emerge from this encounter as an act of bearing witness and listening with his hands. In these works, the forest is not silent. l The Huon rises with a quiet insistence, reaching toward air, toward light, toward continuation. They speak of endurance and fragility, and under them we hear our ecological inheritance under strain. l Edwin’s sculptural language draws from his enduring attentiveness to the natural world and resists categorisation. Part plant, part creature, part memory. Boundaries dissolve, much like his lived experience of hearing shaped over time. In the forest, listening extends beyond sound, and here, in these works, listening is tactile and embodied, a knowing that resides beyond words. In the forest, some forms reach beyond sight, stretching upward into skyscraper canopies. The majestic Huon also burrows downward, searching for unseen water. All are rooted in sacred ground, land protected by ritual, yet too often left exposed by policy. They listen with their branches, tracing the movement of wind like a score. They endure cycles: nourished by the rhythms of the natural world, diminished by the consequences of human action. And when sound recedes, the thing we most often resist must take its place: to feel. The cool density of earth. The agony of destruction. Mist settling across the back of the neck. A hopeful breath in the morning air. To touch the trunk of a Huon pine is to feel deep time, folding past into present, and present into something closer to eternity. There is a recognition of origin and of return. Clay, in this exhibition, is not merely a medium, it is our lineage. It gathers beneath fingernails, settles into skin, circulates through the language of the body. It holds the memory of what we have always been, that we are formed from the earth, and to it we will return. But, is this cycle guaranteed? What happens when extraction overtakes care? When the urgency of greed eclipses the quiet persistence of life? The ancient becomes endangered, and we ourselves, risk extinction. What has endured for millennia begins to fracture within a single generation. These works hold that tension. They stand like the Huon - steady, watchful, and unresolved. When we will not listen, they force us to feel.

Chloe Tanner

Chloe Tanner is an independent contemporary art and sound curator, who lives in nipaluna / Hobart, Tasmania.

This project was supported by the Richard Llewellyn Deaf and Disability Grant, Create SA.