At the entrance to the exhibition, Jeremy Bakker’s On Time (2017) encourages us to consider the benefits and possibilities of ‘slowness’ as both a viewing experience and conceptual space. In Bakker’s work, the second hand of a large-scale clock strains to continue to tick, striking against a granite rock that has smashed the clock’s face in an effort to literally suspend time. The alternative tempos and concepts of time that unfold across the exhibition assume a particular resonance for those of us who have emerged from 2020 in an altered and potentially liberating state. As we reconsider our priorities, values, and necessities on both a planetary and existential level, Slow Moving Waters reminds us to continue to resist the twenty-first-century’s rapacious, consumptive ‘busyness’ – to stop and listen.

The exhibition takes both its cue and name from the farm and vineyard TarraWarra Estate, on which the museum is sited. It was renamed ‘Tarrawarra’ – the local Wurundjeri Woiwurrung word meaning ‘slow moving waters’ – when David Syme, owner and editor of The Age, purchased it in 1893.^[i] Several works, such as Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin and Jonathan Jones’s Making the Birrarung (2021), refer specifically to the place in which they are shown. In this work, hundreds of cast bronze mussel shells wind their way along the floor of the gallery, mirroring the flow of the Birrarung (Yarra River) in the landscape near the museum and reasserting the original custodians’ sustainable use of, and connection to, Country.

Mandy Quadrio, Whose time are we on? 2021, installation view, TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2021 (photograph: Andrew Curtis). Courtesy of the artist.

James Geurts’s Flow Equation (2021) continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of the commodification and subsequent transformation of river systems. The work maps the points of human intervention along the river near the museum through a series of wall-based neon ‘drawings’ and lightboxes housing glitchy, back-lit ‘images’ of the landscape captured via a solar-powered handheld scanner. Created at ‘charged sites at which the natural flow of the river is interrupted, altered or diverted by commercial, technological and cultural forces, often co-opted by human interest’^[ii], this commanding work is at once beautiful, chaotic, and strangely violent. Within the elegant and privileged space of TarraWarra’s beautiful galleries – with its vistas to the lush Yarra Valley landscape beyond – time assumes a fluid, meditative, almost liquid pace; urging us to reimagine our world, our place within it, and our impact upon it.

The exhibition includes work by a numberof First Nations artists from around Australia. These range from Noŋgirrŋa Marawili’s breathtaking barks capturing the ‘essence’ of the landscape of her home in Blue Mud Bay, East Arnhem Land to Mandy Quadrio’s cocoon-like installation of steel wool, Whose time are we on? (2021), which speaks of the systems of labour/slavery at the heart of colonisation and the resilience of Tasmania’s palawa. Works such as these urge us to draw on ancient, embedded knowledge and to look to the Indigenous concept of caring for Country. This concept is powerfully encapsulated in Brian Martin’s fragmented landscape drawings Methexical Countryscape (2020). Within his installation, Martin places one of his large, exquisitely rendered charcoal drawings on the floor in front of another displayed on the wall. To best engage with the work on the wall, the viewer is encouraged to step on the other and to literally walk on Country. How quickly the notion of ‘treading lightly on Country’ is made real by breaking the taboo of stepping on a work of art.

The impact of time on our escalating climate crisis and the lack of time we have to address this are evident in many of the works through acts of care and attention by the artists. Despite the co-option of these concepts by the multi-million-dollar wellness industry, these acts manage to register as considered and meaningful. In one of the most powerful works in the exhibition – Sincerity and Symbiosis, (2019) – artist Jacobus Capone is captured walking barefoot in a plantation forest in Shiga prefecture in Japan. This three-channel video documents a six-week-long durational performance in which the artist, at every few steps, stops to hold his hand up to, but not touch, the trunk of a tree. Capone’s simple homage is replete with reverence, pathos and tenderness. His ultimately futile action and the fact that the debris on the forest floor reveals recent logging activity heighten the work’s sorrowful mood. This in turn reflects the cycle of inaction and feeling overwhelmed that so many of us experience in the face of ominous climate data and the new realities of our warming planet.

Jacobus Capone, Sincerity and Symbiosis 2019, installation view, TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2021 (photograph: Andrew Curtis). Courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary, Perth.

Works in the exhibition also grapple poetically with time scales that extend beyond the diurnal or the genealogical to encompass the geological and the cosmological. Technology’s enormous impact on the velocity of contemporary life is equally figured in a kind of stuttering or fragmented experience of time. Christian Capurro’s enclastacine ink jet prints (2017–21), for example, are high-keyed abstracted images created by using ‘smart defects removal’ software. By effectively ‘degrading’ photographic imagery, these images heighten the sense that, despite its many advantages, technology is inescapable and, at times, insidious and fallible.

The works in Slow Moving Waters are complex and multi-layered but in no way bombastic in their complexity. They hold it lightly, and generously, encouraging a sense of open-endedness and the possibility of being with and in solutions. Works like Raquel Ormella’s needlework pieces In the small gaps of the day so I don’t notice the length of the accumulated time (2021) foreground slow and meticulous acts of making, as well as the importance and potential frustration of ‘downtime’, and of the time in between, when things don’t go according to plan. The sense of temporal dilation within these interstitial moments – moments of thinking, experimentation, and uncertainty – is also what makes them intervals of creativity. As the artists in the exhibition reveal, it is in this space of hope and change that we can resist, in ways however small, the ceaseless expectations and demands of ‘progress’ that continue to energise our world.

^[i] Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO, ‘Tarrawarra – Slow Moving Waters’ in Slow Moving Waters, exh. cat., TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 27 March–11 July 2021, p. 9.

^[ii] Exhibition wall label, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2021.

Slow Moving Waters, the TarraWarra Biennial, continues at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville until 11 July 2021.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.