Essay: Conversations with Mangroves

Drawing on an interview with Australian artist Joshua Yeldham, whose work orbits around notions of nature, ritual and myth, the essay challenges assumed notions of landscape as mute backdrop to human experience, proposing and exploring ways of storying more-than-human animacy through creative practices such as painting and writing. Exploring both Western and First Nations perspectives on land and language, in order to place the writing and ideas contained within it in a contemporary Australian context, the essay asks significant questions regarding settler-colonial ways of storying and perceiving land, as well as proposing alternative ways of languaging human-land relations. An excerpt:

If you stare long enough into a mangrove forest at high tide you will witness a story taking shape. Shadow, trunk, leaf and mud weave words in the air. A language emerges – a gentle in-breath – and it is not your own.

Stay a while. Stay in the space between water and canopy, where the light is just enough to illuminate the white-grey forms of the trees that breathe through mud, where tiny soft creatures living in hard shells make their way up and down trunks with the tide, where all else is shadow. Stay until one, maybe two, of the words whispered through gaps between leaves begin to make sense. […]

The essay was commissioned by Ewan McEoin, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture at the National Gallery of Victoria for the 2023 NGV Triennial catalogue. The Triennial (3 Dec 2023 – 7 Apr 2024) is an internationally significant biannual exhibition featuring 120 artists, designers and collectives at the forefront of global contemporary practice.