Re- the World
Through the 1980s and ’90s Aucklander Sarah Smuts-Kennedy worked as an actor, as well as running her own applied arts business, SSK Design. It was after moving to Australia in 2000 that she began her visual art practice, initially working in photography.
Her 2006 Painting Rubbish series consisted of monochromatic renderings of her photographs of trash-strewn, smoky landscapes on the outskirts of New Delhi. Moody vistas of snaky trees and drifts of plastic litter form dark rectangles superimposed over washy sepia grounds. What the artist calls ‘shabby realism’1 intersects with the dusty light and drooping eucalypts of a conventional Australian landscape tradition.
One of these works, Garden View, was purchased for the office of the then Shadow Minister for the Environment (and later Australian Prime Minister), Malcolm Turnbull. Smuts-Kennedy recalls:
I remember feeling both excited and deflated by this. I wanted my works to contribute to a transformation, but in that moment I realised they were maybe doing the opposite. They had become baubles; virtue signalling, pearl clutching. I felt like I got trapped in pointing to environmental disaster, like in Walter Benjamin’s account of the Angel of History.
The Angel is propelled backwards into the future, paralysed by the chaos in their wake.