after the earth

 Along with myriad other life forms, we are part of the earth.It is our home, our green and blue anchor in the dark...

... At times, it is a fraught relationship. We burn and pillage its resources. At other times, we treat it with care, reverence and respect. Undoubtedly, one of our most fruitful connections to the earth is how we engage creatively with its materials and the infinitely complex experience of living upon it. For millennia, artists have been inspired by the earth, the endless cycle of life and death playing out across its surface. Brought together here for After the Earth, six Australian artists work across painting, ceramics, collage and photography to consider how we engage with the earth and how lived experience shapes our understanding of all the beauty and mystery it contains.

Through the mediums of collage and painting, Eloise Kirk blends images of landscapes and geographical features to build layered visuals both familiar and strange. Mountains, volcanoes and rock formations are displaced from their original habitats to become dreamlike vistas of the sublime, markers of the tipping point between the beautiful and the grotesque.

With a background in printmaking, painting and sculpture, Kirk uses found books and photos as source materials to construct her images, ripping and tearing what she finds before layering each image across a circular surface. There is a time-worn, vintage feel to Kirk’s aesthetic, like these abstract landscapes have been sourced from a 1950s sci-fi wilderness. Devoid of clearly defined features to aid recognition in the real physical world, Kirk’s collages hint at decay and transformation, particularly within an environmental context. Looking at Kirk’s work, a quiet stillness exudes and we are left to wonder, are these landscapes at the beginning or the end?

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 Tracing back to ancient Egypt, the practice of marquetry involves assembling thin slices of wood and veneers into puzzle-like decorative images and patterns. Frequently used by the upper classes as a symbol of wealth and status, marquetry is rife in the interiors of 18^th century Italian palazzos and French royal courts. More recently, contemporary artists have begun to use marquetry as a reaction against AI generated imagery as the complex and highly intricate technique is intensely hands-on andelaborate.

Incorporating marquetry into his wall-mounted images, Naoise Halloran-Mackay constructs checkerboard-like patterns to create the optical illusion of three-dimensional space. Interior spaces are a key element, and as a keen birdwatcher, he populates these spaces more often with birds than humans. In works like Starlings, 2026 and Plains Wanderer, 2026, his dreamlike interiors offer shelter on a dark night, as a flurry of birds come and go to the stars outside.

Drawn to timber for how its physical form retains evidence of organic history within its unique markings and textures, Halloran-Mackay initially gained his skills through a carpentry apprenticeship. During this time, he began to collect discarded timber offcuts from building sites and timber processing factories. As regular visitors to the building sites he was working on, enterprising birds were seen nesting in the rafters, and he began to view them as creatures who could travel into areas controlled by humans in ways most other wild animals could not. Winged sightseers traveling inside and out between dream and reality.

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Starting at a grassroots level and inspired by a growing global community of photographers led by London’s Sustainable Darkroom, Pete Maarseveen is creating an off-grid, eco-friendly darkroom at his home in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley. In the hopes of treading more lightly upon the earth, Maarseveen has been experimenting with solar power, tank water and low toxic chemicals. His aim is to use plants growing on his property to create eco-friendly chemicals, with wastewater from the printing process going to irrigate the same plants in a cyclic system. He uses paper negatives as an alternative to film, sourcing his papers from tip-shops and op-shops to reduce plastic consumption in his studio practice.

In 2025, Maarseveen took part in the Bob Brown Artist Retreat where he camped with 40 other artists at McKimmie Creek in Takayna/Tarkine in Tasmania’s northwest. As Australia’s largest cool-temperate rainforest dating back to Gondwanan times, Takayna is home to azure kingfishers, masked owls and giant crayfish. Over the course of two years, more than 2000 protestors have led the charge in protecting this unique natural pocket from its imminent destruction by global mining company, MMG. While at McKimmie Creek, Maarseveen photographed the forest with a large format camera, setting up a simple darkroom in the back of his ute and developing negatives with chemistry made from myrtle leaves found on the forest floor. There is an inkiness to his images, the depthof shadows and economical intake of light is almost tactile. For Maarseveen, the plants he uses in this process determine how the images turn out.      

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Also working with ceramics is Georgie Vozar, a potter currently based in Richmond, Tasmania.Maintaining a ceramic practice deeply rooted in human connection, family and community play an integral role in Vozar’s work. While growing up, she lived above her father’s ceramic studio in Queensland’s Blackall Range, surrounded by creative materials and objects in varied stages of completion. Further afield in outback Queensland, her grandparents managed cattle stations she would often visit. After moving to Tasmania in 2012, Vozar began learning ceramics from her father and together they have built their own earthenware practice.

In her solo practice, Vozar remains inspired by her surrounding environment. Her time in Queensland is still a guiding force, and its influence can be seen in the carefully chosen glazes and hand-applied textures of her amphora-like vessels. Mesa, 2026 is inspired by Mt Slowcombe in Yaraka and the nearby Yang Yang Range, a landscape Vozar says reveals itself slowly and quietly. Other vessels connect to places in Tasmania – Fen, 2026 recalls the Great Lake region of the Central Plateau – while others reflect personal challenges, water meeting the earth and places where physical terrain has been transformed by light.

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Jake Walker also connects to the earth with care, using recycled materials like found boards and canvases to ease the environmental burden of over consumption. His painting palette is distinctively bright, with primary colours generously applied to evoke a sunrise or in contrast, the sooty turrets of chimneys. Favouring an abstract style, Walker views his paintings and frames as a whole object. He describes his work as having “spatial ambitions,” and creates hand formed ceramic frames for each of his paintings. Often sprouting appendages of cylindrical knobs and curved pipes, his frames extend into the gallery space, beckoning us to look closer. These organic architectural forms are inherently inspired by a childhood spent surrounded by the work of his father, New Zealand architect Roger Walker, and the organic, curvaceous dwellings of fellow architect, Ian Athfield. Each piece Walker presents is compact and self-contained, a deeply considered microcosm of paint and form highlighting the hand of the maker. 

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Looking at all the works in After the Earth it quickly becomes clear there is no singular way to engage with the earth. Whether celebrating its varied environments, the tiny details of nature or delighting in its material bounty, each artist here seeks to understand the earth, and their relationship to it, more deeply. Bringing their collective knowledge and curiosity to the images and objects they make, they ask the same of us. To take time to think about our place on earth, to wonder at its marvels and move through life with care, always leaving a softer footprint behind.