Ben Somerville, Sand goanna, 2002, corrugated iron, rivets, collection of the artist

Wild Nature is a large exhibition, 69 exhibits by 45 artists: its seemingly unfettered nature causing this reviewer to look for some kind of initial taxonomy by size! Wall texts guide the viewer on a journey around the works on display; the mood evoked is that of a journey somewhere between romanticism stripped of the sublime and natural history hippies wowing at nature through visuals. Is this a ‘born again’ nature show?

No, not exactly but I had to look carefully before changing my mind. Wild Nature is tackling a number of issues: one is the enduring constructedness of our vision of nature. We tend to look past native flora and make exotic what is everyday fare in the bush backyard. Michael Kluvanek’s image, derived from a photographic process of magnifying an object and removing it from its surrounds, produces a startlingly enlarged Bush banana. It seems strange and way off the scale of familiar fare. But is it? The fruit is a staple part of the diet of indigenous peoples in drier parts of Central and Northern Australia and curator Margot Osborne re-presents it in two works from the Utopia area. Ada Bird Petyarre’s batik Big bush banana is rich in deep pink tones offset by white imagery features the fruit, while Lucy Kunoth Kngwarreye’s acrylic on canvas Bush banana shows the fruit cut open, its inner structure revealed as perfect. This is one of the strongest images in the show with its deep green sections framed by black flesh.

Another aspect of our vision the exhibition tackles is the quiet beauty and precision of nature; this may be in its pristine form, which Robyn Best emulates in her organic porcelain works Black Coral and Bryozoan. The delicately intricate but perfectly formed patterns are those of coral and other marine plants. Is the curator hinting at the hand of God and the well worn ‘argument by design’ as evidence that God exists? Alternatively the wild beauty of nature left wild seems the subject of Bruce Goold’s Bogong moths 1-IV: the erratic lines surrounding each moth may be the lines of flight of these large, beautiful creatures.

The understated beauty of wild nature is presented, re-arranged and tamed in Hossein Valamanesh’s Miniature with lemon scented gum leaves and Miniature with Casuarina needles; the needles abstracted from their surrounds look arrestingly modern. Ruth Hadlow rearranges and sews together acacia and eucalypt leaves to form a wagga intended as autobiographical keepsake, a memory piece of past travels. Similarly, James Darling re-presents nature in his wonderful mallee root installation Mallee fowl nest 10: Spring.

European settlers have been taming wild nature since settlement. That is not a startling revelation but one referred to also by Stephen Bowers in his Cockatoo plate. He shows how the spaces inhabited by the cockatoos sitting on their gum trees are being overtaken by settlement. Shards of English china, some in an imperialising blue willow pattern, are set in tracts of cleared land represented as ‘authentic landscape’ by our landscape painters and, tongue-in-cheek, by Bowers himself.

Indigenous artists are well represented in this exhibition with numerous bark paintings, prints and woven and sculptural objects made using natural fibres. They too are presented as representing ‘wild nature’. But is it wild, uncultivated nature? Many of the images that appear on the barks are Dreaming stories; the animals such as water serpent, goanna and shark are intrinsic to indigenous culture in various regions. The barks may indeed be the best works on show especially ones like Mowarra Ganambarr’s depiction of the ancestral shark being in Mana at Rorruwuy Datiwuy. Other works are both beautiful and contemporary, zany even in the case of Ben Somerville’s corrugated iron Sand goanna. But where the animals are a part of the Dreaming as with the barks, I do wonder about their inclusion in an exhibition about ‘wild’ or untamed nature. Is that not a settlement view of nature implying either that it has been tamed or it can’t be tamed? Perhaps the exhibition needs another name?

Wall panels bearing text by Tim Flannery of The Future Eaters fame and Peter Timms remind viewers the land is not empty, as does Yolngu artist Wanduk Marika in the catalogue essay. That vernacular phrase ‘the empty centre’ ought to be expunged from the vocabulary of all who see this exhibition. Wild Nature is a nature tour via contemporary art and craft. But I do wonder whether the tour which is, in essence, an indigenous and non-indigenous Australian homage to nature, was a little long. A tighter show about fundamentally differing understandings of nature by indigenous Australians and non-indigenous Australians might have had more punch, especially in relation to that space these artists and craftspeople are attempting to co-habit.

For more images of the exhibition visit the website