earthbound continues Stephanie Valentin’s interest in the human imprint on the natural world. To create this series Valentin returned to the area in which she grew up - the semi-arid mallee on the eastern edge of South Australia. Through the interplay of still lives and landscape, Valentin explores our uncertain relationship to the earth’s processes. In the ambiguous light between dusk and full moon, her compositions serve as open-ended experiments, raising questions rather than delivering answers.

Climate change has highlighted the interconnectedness of earth’s natural systems, the biological, atmospheric and geological. Valentin is drawn to this complexity, and to the human desire to measure, grasp and predict aspects of the natural world that continue to elude us.

Eloquently elaborating these concerns, Rainbook depicts the measurements duly noted for the year 1977 in her father’s rain book, which stands open and illuminated in a red field. In the intermittent and diverse recordings, we see the vagaries of nature itself. In the handwritten log, we see the desire to understand, to predict and to harness the rain.

Valentin’s images evoke the landscape as laboratory and stage. They traverse curious scenarios from the chemical to the personal, suggestive of ecological systems askew or human measurement adrift. In Gathering field #3, a mound of scientific vessels and biological samples is set against the arid landscape of Lake Mungo, a now dry inland lake system that was abundant with life 15,000 years ago. In cornucopia scientific vessels are replaced by domestic glassware that shimmers in an empty field.

© Stephanie Valentin

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As in series such as ether (2006), fathom (2004), pollinate (2002) and chiasma (2000) Valentin’s investigations give rise to images that are thoughtful and poetic, asking us to consider the interdependence of living systems and the way human activity impacts upon its environment.

Stephanie Valentin’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and Parliament House, Canberra.

Artist Talk, Saturday 27 June - 2pm

© William Lamson

William Lamson is a Brooklyn based artist, interested in photography, sculpture and performance. Using simple materials he creates structures and scenarios full of pathos and humour.

With a 24-minute video of 33 short performances and accompanying photographic images, Lamson’s series Actions documents the fates of numerous ill-fated black balloons. In contrast to his “scientific” approach, invoked by a stark white background and serious demeanour, the equipment and activities he depicts are unsophisticated and somewhat improbable. His understated “actions” employ low-tech props such as darts, ropes and pellet guns, or simply gravity’s unavoidable pull, and more often than not end badly for the balloons.

Lamson combines the amateur’s meager budget and compensatory surfeit of imagination with the whimsical and haphazard nature of helium balloons, to create a dialogue of both hope and failure. By enacting a series of grand, though often self-defeating experiments, his work addresses the universality of human struggle and how we create meaning through adversity. With his fictional explorations, Lamson hopes to elicit the sense of hope, possibility and wonder that motivates amateurs and artists alike.

Lamson found his artistic voice after reading “Professionals and Amateurs,” an essay by Edward Said. In it, Said champions the virtue of amateurism, “the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love or an unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down by speciality.” In turn, lamenting the effect of professionalism to limit curiosity, destroying one’s sense of excitement and discovery.

For Lamson, feeling fenced in by the style of photography he had studied for years rather than artistically free to do as he wished, this essay struck a chord. Recognising how the history of photography and the history of flight were both pioneered by amateurs, his response was to build a 3-metre paper airplane before photographing it at night, marking the beginning of his earlier work, the Sublunar project (shown at Stills in 2007) and an expanded working process that included sculpture and video.

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