Stuart McLachlan and Simon Cardwell Artist Statement
Extinction is often framed as an irreversible ending-a final consequence of human arrogance, extraction, and neglect. Yet within these histories exists a quieter, less acknowledged truth: humans
also possess the capacity to repair, restore, and protect. This body of work explores that dynamic, documenting not only loss but the possibility of renewal.
Through deliberate intervention, species once pushed to the brink have been brought back from near-erasure. When human attitudes shift from domination to stewardship, conservation becomes not an act of control but of collaboration. Approached with humility, patience, and long-term vision,
humanity can influence the natural world in ways that are regenerative rather than destructive.
This work is not about absolution-it does not erase loss, nor claim that human influence is always positive. It is about possibility. It asks viewers to reconsider humanity's role-not as separate from nature, but as an active participant capable of both destruction and renewal. Through the bison, the Siberian crane, and the Arabian oryx. this series celebrates species that have been given a
second chance. inviting reflection on what it takes to allow life to return and endure.
Kim Anderson Artist Statement
Through intricately detailed drawing I explore our complex relationship with the natural world, often using the landscape as metaphor for psychological unrest as we grapple with our place on this earth.
My own recent experiences of human bereavement have overlapped with a wider sense of grief and anxiety associated with climate change and the loss of fragile ecosystems. Traversing an uneasy space between seeking solace in nature, while also confronting the horrifying reality of a natural world in crisis, the landscape reflects back at me the grief I feel as it undergoes its own multitude of losses.
The ‘Fugue’ drawings are a physical, embodied manifestation of a troubled psyche in these tumultuous, uncertain times – a kind of “fugue state” attempting to disassociate from a news cycle constantly screaming of atrocities and crises, of bushfires, floods and mass extinctions, a climate on the brink of collapse, war and geopolitical instability, and a rising wave of fear and intolerance.
The ‘Into Thin Air’ series is a quieter meditation on grief and the temporality of all things. The natural world is not so distant from our human dilemmas, with its cycles of life and death, destruction and
transformation, and decay and renewal. Beauty and violence, and fragility and brutality coexist in nature as they do in the human world. An acute awareness of the peril the earth is facing only heightens my awe and astonishment as the light pierces through the trees and obliterates everything in its path.
My drawing is an act of witnessing, validating and making sense of many contradictory feelings all at once – joy, fear, grief, love, terror, beauty and awe. Everything is in flux, nothing is fixed or final. Our existence on this planet is both sublimely beautiful, and fleetingly tragic.
Stuart Mclachlan is regarded as one of the world's premier paper sculptors. Working from a foundation in graphic design and illustration, and after years spent between Adelaide, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver before settling in Sydney, he hand-cuts paper into intricate figures and architectures so finely rendered they take on a porcelain-like finish. Combined with stone, paint and found materials, these delicate constructions carry conceptually bold arguments about humanity's environmental impact. interrogating displacement. survival, and the fragile balance between progress and destruction. As Mclachlan puts it, it is not enough for a piece to be pretty; it has to say something, and his sculptures characteristically hold an uneasy, quiet tension. His reach extends well beyond the gallery: commissions from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Disney+, Australia Post and the State Opera of South Australia, work published in The Economist. The New Yorker, Vogue and Newsweek, and inclusion in the definitive international surveys of paper art, from 'PaperCuts' to Luerzer's '200 Best Illustrators Worldwide'. He is currently exhibiting in Homo Faber:Island of Light in Venice.
Simon Cardwell is a photographer whose work moves between documentary precision and constructed fiction.Trained in Adelaide and in the Netherlands, where he completed photography degrees at the Academie St. Joost and the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, Cardwell has built a practice recognised across three decades of solo and group exhibitions, from the Greenaway Art Gallery in the 1990s to recent finalist showings at the Museum of the Avant-garde in Switzerland, the Art Gemini Prize in London, and the Moran and Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert photography awards. His images are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and his commissioned public projects extend the work beyond the frame into civic space.
Kim Anderson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy in 2003, and in 2007 was awarded a scholarship to study a Master of Fine Art at the University of Dundee in Scotland. She is now currently a Doctoral candidate at the National Art School in Sydney.
Anderson has been awarded a number of residencies around the world including a Creative Australia Studio Residency at the British School at Rome, Australia House in Echigo-Tsumari, Japan, Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland, and at Hill End and the Bundanon Trust in NSW. In 2016 she undertook a three-month residency at DRAWinternational in Caylus, France, which was supported by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, the Copyright Agency and Creative Partnerships Australia. In 2019 Anderson was the recipient of the Jon Schueler Scholarship, a three-month residency at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, National Centre for Gaelic Language, Culture and the Arts on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.
Exhibiting both around Australia and abroad, she has been a multiple-time finalist in numerous national awards including most recently the National Works on Paper (2026, 2020), Grace Cossington-Smith Award (2026, 2021), Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2025, 2024, 2021 & 2019 People’s Choice Award), Gosford Art Prize (2025), Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (2024, 2022, 2020), the Paul Guest Award (2024, 2018, 2016), Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2023), Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2023, 2013), and the Muswellbrook Art Prize (2022) among others.
In an expansion of her drawing practice, Anderson has also created a number of site-specific projects incorporating large-scale wall drawing, translucent suspended works, projection, poetry, and soundscapes. In 2024, in collaboration with sound artist Fukusan and set designers Form Imagination, she was commissioned to present The Lost Breath for White Night Ballarat, an immersive installation incorporating sound, visual art and kinetic sculpture. In 2021, Anderson was commissioned alongside poet Nathan Curnow and sound artist Rue Curnow to create new work in response to the Covid pandemic for Mutual Realities: Finding Common Ground in Uncertain Times at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Additionally, she has presented site-specific installations in Scotland, France, Japan, Bathurst, Launceston and Hobart.
