Ecology Studies (Adrift Lab)

Lucienne Rickard

Ecology Studies (Adrift Lab) is a year-long performance in which Tasmanian artist Lucienne Rickard will attend each day to the task of drawing a large tableaux of shearwater birds, across various stages of their lifecycle, and images of the artist and her family, scenes adapted from memory, old photographs, and other imaginings, embedded alongside the landscape of Lord Howe Island. And as these graphite images are completed, they will be washed from the surface, leaving vestiges only, bleeding one into the other, a hybrid genealogy of seabird, family, and place.

Lucienne’s connection to the flesh-footed shearwater stems from childhood when she would take annual holidays to see her grandmother who lived on Lord Howe Island, her parents now residing in the family home. The mournful wail and moan of the seabirds’ call has long been associated for the artist to memories of her grandmother, now deceased. The near extinction of these seabirds carrying with it the further loss of any remnant link to this personal history, the struggle to save one forged to the need to sustain the other. The accumulated washed images of this work therefore creating an urgent and dappled memento vivere: ‘remember that you must live.’

Flesh-footed shearwaters (Ardenna carneipes) are widely distributed across the southern Indian and south- western Pacific Oceans during the breeding season, with Australian colonies in Western Australia, South Australia, and on Lord Howe Island. They are occasional visitors to Tasmania, distinct from the more locally abundant short-tailed shearwater (Ardenna tenuirostris) that breeds around Tasmania.

Over the past 40 years, the span of the artist's lifetime, the population of flesh-footed shearwaters on Lord Howe Island has dropped from approximately 40 000 pairs to 22 654 pairs in 2018, a loss of nearly half. This has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature to designate the seabirds as ‘Near Threatened’ and ‘Decreasing’ on its Red List of Threatened Species.

In the past decade this decline, and its underlying causes, have been tracked by Adrift Lab, a group of scientists studying all things adrift in the ocean. They identify long-term trends and quantify the general impact of marine plastic pollution on the oceans, on humans, and on wildlife, in particular on the flesh- footed shearwater as emblematic of environmental collapse.

Plastic fragments block or rupture the digestive tract and leak contaminants into the blood-stream of seabirds after ingestion, which may result in stomach ulcerations, liver damage, infertility, and in many cases, death. Over 70 percent of flesh-footed shearwaters breeding on Lord Howe Island have ingested plastic. In 2011, one chick was found to have more than 275 pieces of plastic in its stomach, equivalent to an average human ingesting around 10 kilograms of plastic.

Ecology Studies (Adrift Lab) attempts to apply a human scale to this ecological catastrophe, with the artist memorialising the colony decline that has occurred over the course of her own lifespan.

Ecology Studies (Adrift Lab) merges art and science, a ‘study’ being both a technical art term for a drawing or sketch done in preparation and more generally understood as the practice of devoting time and attention to understanding a topic. In this case, Lucienne is producing a study on the broader question of ecology, the relationship between organisms – birds, humans, and so on – and our natural dwelling place: the environment.

Ecology Studies (Adrift Lab) is a progression from Extinction Studies – Lucienne’s 2019-21 performative artwork that drew attention to species we have lost – and continues her expression of urgent concern for the natural world and our impacts on it. These works have been commissioned by Detached Cultural Organisation who also have an ongoing research project with Adrift Lab on Lord Howe Island.

#EcologyStudies

Dates: 5 April 2021 - 23 January 2022

Location: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) Link Building