Matilda Davis, Every Saint has a past, every Sinner has a future, 2023. Oil on canvas and board, 180 x 120cm. Courtesy: the artist and FUTURES, Melbourne.
FUTURES presents a group exhibition entitled The Bad Gardener, curated in-house and featuring work by an array of artists across generations including new commissions by Matilda Davis and Isadora Vaughan.
The Bad Gardener probes the rich fertility of the land and the artists’ labour itself, populated with various works that toil in the territory of the surreal, geographical, and practical. What is gardened – propagated, tended to, prodded to flourish, churned – is as rich as the external world and the internal rumbling void of the self. The artist reaches inside to grab what is needed and sows in the light of day and night.
The action ‘to garden’ can be seen as an attempt to control ‘unruly nature’ by creating an ordered semblance, to soothe a troubled mind in an act of wellness, or to simply admire. In this exhibition, nature and artists are in beautiful and symbiotic repose as they borrow materials, techniques, fecundity, and chaos. As we come from the earth so do we return.
A thematic undercurrent of this show is the relationship between gallerist and artist; the ‘fertile’ ground that sits below the feet of a showing space. The outdoors come inside, the student becomes the teacher in an unwieldy cultural environment that is alive and in flux.
Exhibited artists include: Olga Bennett, Matilda Davis, Studio Tops x Beau Emmett, Nancy Noonju, Pim van Nunen, Isadora Vaughan, Tyrone Te Waa and Darcy Wedd.
