Uses of Enchantment: Art & Environmentalism

Essay by Sarah Milroy
Contributors:
Shary Boyle - Ruth Jones
Bill Burns - Jody Berland
Sara Angelucci - Kyo McLear
Carrie Allison - Jan Peacock
Qavavau Manumie - Jimmy Manning
Winnie Truong - Alison Cooley

In a time when our human relationship to the natural world is rapidly changing, this exhibition pulls together artists who are registering their experience in ways that intrigue, caution and entrance. The exhibition takes its title from the classic work by Austrian psychologist and scholar Bruno Bettelheim, who posited that children’s fairy tales provide for children an imaginative space in which to process their deepest fears and dread: the death of a parent, abandonment etc. Borrowing this paradigm, curator Sarah Milroy explores how contemporary artists use the strategy of enchantment to explore our contemporary experience of climate change, species and habitat loss, and environmental degradation. These are worlds turned inside out, yet we are drawn into the artists' imaginative visions to reflect on the place we find ourselves in as planet Earth’s rogue species.