The Mistletoe Waltz

This exhibition explores how environmental art practices can unearth and archive positive symbiotic stories. The artist’s sister’s property has experienced increased birdlife since becoming regenerative. Habitat loss is the key threat to the painted honey eater, traditionally farmers have shunned mistletoe, considering it parasitic.

This multidisciplinary environmental art exhibition includes field work on Bigambul country near Goondiwindi, as well as creative experiments of drawing, painting and assemblage construction that were completed in Lloyd-Giblett’s home studio on the Sunshine Coast. The collection of works was driven by the artist’s desire to investigate historical, ethical and affective relationships she has with the Western Queensland landscape. Through the making process Lloyd-Giblett embodied environmental art practices to create and imagine a speculative future for this site, grounded in notions of kinship, reciprocity and care.

Lloyd-Giblett explained that her explorations included traversing the landscape connecting from the earth upwards and transforming passive witnessing into an immersive wit(h)nessing. She further noted that she walked, paused, listened and drew. The landscape was surveyed not with a view to understanding how it can support the artist but with a desire to unearth possibilities of mutual flourishing.

This project employs and draws attention to the symbiotic relationship between mistletoe plants and painted honeyeater (Grantiella picta) birds. Their mutualistic interdependence is a metaphor for stories of care and reparation at this location. Science scholar Donna Haraway argues that knowledge is always partial and contingent. The artist has recognised the “situated knowledge” brought to this project by her personal connection to the region where her sisters farm sits. It is geographically close to the Chinchilla property where the artist grew up. She explains that ‘she has repositories of archival memoriesof this region. By making this work I hope to commemoratethe landscape’.

Over a period of 18 months the site specific drawings, paintings and research became futuristic habitats. These works connect to the importance of non-familial relationships within nature. Art has the potential to create a deeper understanding of non-human inhabitants. She explains that Nature writer and environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth argues that “we all have a part to play in regeneration and conservation”. Lloyd-Giblett’s work connects to the theoretical trajectories of kinship, wit(h)ness, labour of care and regenerative farming practices. The installation offers immersive experiences of being in the land among nest assemblages, drawings, paintings, video footage and a 10 meter scroll. She employs an auto-ethnographic approach to cultivate records of experiences in the field. These structured notes include descriptions of specific plants (e.g. mistletoe), birds, observations of scientists and farmers, frottage from trees, and the creation of wind formed ventifacts.

The artist’s art-science approach encapsulates internal thoughts and scientific information. She pursued the notion of creating meaning through mediums and materials. The charcoal drawings hold embedded memory (collected from site) and these create a bricolage. The newly formed organic assemblages took on the seasonal hues of red and yellow blooms and curved stem structures of the mistletoe plants.

Art historian Saha Grishin states that artists “no longer think of themselves as people who stand in front of the landscape to record it but instead see the landscape and themselves as part of a broader whole”. Historically landscape art explores the idea of the artist as the observer. Lloyd-Giblett’s works draw a parallel with environmental artists who respect and support Indigenous ontologies and the entanglements between human and non-human bodies. The acknowledgement of this complexity is the basis for understanding Country and history.

Practices of site-responsive environmental art is not a new phenomenon. The Earth Canvas Project 2020 is an example of artists and regenerative farmers being interconnected with nature. In this age of the Anthropocene Lloyd-Giblett has attempted to give voice to buried stories of care and reciprocity and, in doing so, has unearthed possibilities for a reimagined western Queensland landscape.