Cultural Flo at Cement Fondu
Head to Cement Fondu and visit the Project Space for Virtue & Virtuosity, where Speaking in Colour have presented a newly commissioned installation of traditionally woven turtles, Cultural Flo.
The installation was created by a collective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators, artists and health professionals who offer a range of innovative cultural and art workshops that embrace Aboriginal perspectives and foster powerful, positive relationships between First Nations and non-First Nations people.
Our presentation of woven turtles, made by Tamara Jackson, Anissa Harwood, Kristin Sheldon, Nina Ross, Lynelle Shipp and Cherie Johnson, encapsulates a traditional, embodied and slow mode of sharing knowledges and educating for ecological care — which offers a powerful counterpoint to the themes of environmental apathy and virtue-signalling explored throughout the rest of Virtue & Virtuosity.
Weaving workshop - Sunday 8 May 2022
For thousands of years, weaving has held knowledge and ways of knowing, being and doing for Aboriginal peoples, interwoven into rope, baskets, dilly bags, mats and objects for ceremony. The Speaking in Colour Weaving Workshop will introduce you to this vital and ancient practice, catering to a beginners level. Led by Kristin Sheldon, an Awabakal woman, the workshop will start with creating a wearable artwork (bracelet) before moving onto a small woven bowl. Book now
About the exhibition
BETTER NATURE is a new annual program of art and events that examines ecological ideas from a more-than-human perspective, responding to our time of planetary crisis by embracing the complex entanglement of human and non-human worlds.
Inspired by Superflux’s field guide Calling for the practice of a more-than-human politics, the inaugural BETTER NATURE exhibition, Virtue & Virtuosity, finds us in a ‘State of Impasse’, in which the prospect of climate catastrophe with no hopeful pathways forward means that “a “cold panic” and an impotent fear of the future sets in, functionally demobilising people.” Not designed to motivate, shame or preach about ecological inaction and climate catastrophe, this show instead mirrors us back at ourselves, frozen between denialism and doom, complicity and rage, and awash with apathy, overwhelm and confusion about how to really make a difference.