Solastalgia

Solastalgia Artist Statement: Close observational drawing forms the core of my practice as I explore the physical manifestations of a psyche in turmoil, often using elements of the external landscape as metaphors for intense psychological states.  Much of my work involves a deeply personal emotional scrutiny in order to confront the more difficult aspects of human experience.

Solastalgia describes that which is difficult to express through words alone.  With its origins in nostalgia, solace, destruction and suffering, it can be variously defined as a melancholia associated with the radical alteration of a landscape that was once familiar, a form of homesickness while still at home, or an anticipatory grief over the loss of a beloved natural environment.

The initial impetus for this on-going series of drawings was borne out of a profound personal grief, when my work became a necessary outlet to explore the physical embodiment of the intense emotions I was feeling.  However, when this started to feel too insular, I began to move beyond the purely personal and explore grief within a broader context, expressing a much more universal sense of bereavement over the rapidly accelerating degradation of our planet. 

CATALOGUE ESSAY by ANNA DUNNILL 2019 ‘Solastalgia’ is a fairly new word. Many of us won’t have come across it yet. But we are increasingly aware of the condition it describes. Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term in 2003, defines ‘solastalgia’ as ‘an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment.’ i  In other words, it describes the feelings of grief, loss and distress caused by ecological destruction.

On a 37 degree day during a residency in Mildura, Kim Anderson takes a camera out to an area of bushland she describes as ‘apocalyptic’: a bare place of dead trees and dried-out salt lakes that is, she says, ‘beautiful and terrible at the same time.’ Here she documents her interactions with the landscape. The process of physically moving the body is a way of testing ideas; the photographs become preliminary sketches. Through the intricate black and white drawings that subsequently develop, Anderson conjures a space of grief and psychic turmoil. A barefoot feminine figure is depicted amongst gnarled trees, her body stretched along a fallen tree trunk or clinging to a branch. The texture of rough bark, the silky folds of the dress, are rendered so precisely they can be felt. There is quiet in these drawings, and care.

Long interested in the physical expression of psychological trauma, Anderson’s exploration of solastalgia—also known as ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘ecological grief’—began with her 2018 solo exhibition To Live Alone in a World of Wounds at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. This new body of work continues and deepens her research. Solastalgia is a recently documented disorder, so new that we haven’t settled on a name for it yet, but it is manifesting on a global scale. Studies into the psychological effects of climate change have focused on widely disparate populations—Inuit in Arctic Canada; farmers in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region—whose livelihoods are suffering the effects of global warming. ii  As the climate emergency grows ever more palpable, ecological grief and despair rise like floodwaters.

In Anderson’s drawings, the shape of tree limbs are subtly echoed in the gestures of the figure’s body. The dress—flouncy, ankle-length, wildly impractical—recalls the patterns of tree bark in its many folds and creases. This figure is at once out of place in the landscape, and implicitly connected to it, shadowing the trees that cling in death to the soil.

The Victorian-era dress offers a connection through time to Australia’s colonial history. Indigenous Australians, of course, have suffered the rapid destruction of their own environment and cultures, and the extent of this catastrophe is still unravelling. Historians such as Indigenous scholar Bruce Pascoe are still working to understand the highly developed economies of agriculture and aquaculture that shaped much of Australia’s landscape prior to colonisation. Early colonisers recorded tilled fields, grain stores, houses, cemeteries, aqua-engineering; often, however, all physical evidence of tens of thousands of years’ careful work was destroyed within only a few seasons, erased from historical memory.iii

Solastalgia was produced through hundreds of hours of exacting labour, and Anderson’s process offers, perhaps, a strategy for coping with ecological grief. Hers is a practice of deep looking, of close touching; awareness of both the psyche and the outer world. Her drawings exhort us to pay attention, as though our lives depend on it.

Footnotes:   i.Albrecht, Glenn, ‘The Age of Solastalgia,’ The Conversation, 2012, https://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337   ii.Ellis, Neville and Cunsolo, Ashlee, ‘Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding Ecological Grief,’ The Conversation, 2018, http://theconversation.com/hope-and-mourning-in-the-anthropocene-understanding-ecological-grief-88630   iii.Pascoe, Bruce, Dark Emu, revised edition, 2016 (first published 2014), Magabala Books. much of Australia’s landscape prior to colonisation. Early colonisers recorded tilled fields, grain stores, houses, cemeteries, aqua-engineering; often, however, all physical evidence of tens of thousands of years’ careful work was destroyed within only a few seasons, erased from historical memory.

Kim completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the University of Ballarat in 2003, and in 2007 she was awarded a scholarship to study a Master of Fine Art at the University of Dundee in Scotland.  Since then she has undertaken a number of residencies around the world including an Australia Council Studio Residency at the British School at Rome, Australia House in Echigo-Tsumari, Japan, Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland, Murray’s Cottage in Hill End, the University of Tasmania and Scotch Oakburn College in Launceston, and The Art Vault in Mildura. 

In 2016 Kim undertook a three-month residency at DRAWinternational in Caylus, France, which was supported by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, the Copyright Agency Creative Industries Career Fund, and Creative Partnerships Australia.

In 2010 Kim received an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council, and she has created and curated projects supported by Arts Victoria, the City of Melbourne, and Regional Arts Victoria.  She has exhibited all around Australia and abroad with solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Mildura, Bendigo, Bathurst, Ballarat, Launceston, Hobart and Japan, and been a finalist in numerous national awards including the Paul Guest Award, the Rick Amor Drawing Prize, and the Hazelhurst Art Award. 

Along with more traditional works on paper, Kim has also created ephemeral installation projects involving site-specific drawing and projection, most notably The Space Between, a visual/sound installation at the inaugural White Night Ballarat in March 2017 which subsequently travelled to the Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart. In 2018 Kim was featured as a core artist in the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA) with a major solo exhibition titled To Live Alone in a World of Wounds at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.