Hobart-based artist Lucienne Rickard was the artist in residence at Adrift Lab’s scientific research post on remote Lord Howe Island in 2014. Adrift Lab is a group of researchers studying plastic waste, chemicals and the effect on marine life. Analysing data gathered at sea and on beaches, they use the information to engage communities and inform policy-making.
The Lord Howe outpost examines the ongoing impacts on the local shearwater bird population. Drawing on their work and responding to it through his art, Rickard’s resulting work ‘Extinction Studies’ merges creativity and science. He spent the year drawing and then erasing a recently extinct species sourced from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
For this new performance of the gesture, now installed at Carriageworks after a stint at the now-closed National Art School, Rickard uses the same paper that was daily drawn upon and erased, and which bears the traces, memories and indentations of this accumulative engagement with loss.
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Detached Cultural Organisation, Adrift Lab’s artist in residence program, it’s a haunting picture of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.
