Coming soon: Big mining and the question of scale

Ann Finegan raises the alarm on the fiendish short-sighted depradations of Big Coal open cut mining in the lower Hunter Valley and other places currently under threat. She describes the work done by artist/activists in response and asks: "How does one fight such incommensurables of scale and the slow unfold of food bowl and water disaster? Where do we start? With protective changes to State and Federal legislation? With commensurable economic data?"

More from this Issue

History of Cultural Responses to Disastrous Storms (1612-2012)

Jennifer Hamilton reviews English and European responses to big storms over time and suggests that even today we need "the more metaphysical dimensions of our existence – the cultural, social and political – to even begin to understand how thunder, lightning, strong winds and an abundance of water falling from the sky can still completely destroy a city and change the course of history."

Jennifer Hamilton

Colour by number

!Metro Arts, Brisbane 19 September – 6 October 2012

Angelita Howell

Bungaree: the First Australian

Curator: Djon Mundine Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney 1 September – 25 November 2012 then touring

Joanna Mendelssohn

Conversations in ellipsis: an exercise in affect & association… time & (e)motion studies, or things unsaid

Curator: Lisa Harms Adelaide Botanic Garden, FELTspace, SASA Gallery 31 July – 26 August 2012

Polly Dance

Contact lenses: Lloyd Godman's ecological art

New Zealand-born ecological artist, Lloyd Godman, who now lives in Australia, has in his own determined way for over thirty years, pondered and acted upon questions of how aesthetics might be involved in creating sustainable solutions to environmental problems. Historian Helen McDonald uses eco-critic Timothy Morton's notion of ambient aesthetics to examine three of Godman's multimedia projects.

Helen McDonald

Promoting the long view

Artist and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon's current practice is focused around documentary filmmaking and social history, motivated by an appreciation of living memory and local vernacular. He writes about the Illuminated by Fire project, an initiative of Regional Arts Victoria, that involved a dozen artists working with eleven local communities in the wake of Black Saturday.

Malcolm McKinnon

Remembering Lidia Groblicka 1933 - 2012

Stephanie Radok

HERE&NOW12

Curator: Katie Lenanton Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 11 August – 6 October 2012

Sheridan Coleman

Beata Batorowicz – Tales within Historical Spaces

QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 September – 28 October 2012

Rainer Doecke

Calamity Japan: grieving artists respond to quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis

Former editor of Japanese Art Scene Monitor and the current Arts, Entertainment and Features Division Chief at The Japan Times, Edan Corkill looks at the wide variety of sensitive works produced by Japanese artists in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukashima Daiichi nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Edan Corkill

Pat Brassington: Á Rebours

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne 11 August - 23 September 2012

Laura Castagnini

Falling through time

In September 2011 at the UTS Gallery in an exhibition called The Fall before the Fall Elvis Richardson and Daniel Mudie Cunningham showed work reflecting on 9/11. Anna Gibbs analyses how their works make this trauma "articulable, shareable and ... to some extent, bearable."

Anna Gibbs

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