Marzena Wasikowska

Earth’s Self Correcting Systems, is a body of work which considers human induced climate change. A response to our environmental predicament, through it, I advance a notion of a sublime. Humanity stands before nature wondering what on earth we have unleashed. My images reference the vocabulary of the sublime, to visualise impacts of climate change. I propose that the most relevant contemporary sublime is the ecological sublime.

The Earth’s active systems respond to impacts that human beings have set in motion, and dynamically self-corrects.

Art is a cultural activity capable of engaging deep emotions. Emotions stimulate the desire to care, to act, or to change. The desire once ignited has the power to influence behaviour. I construct images which visualise the Sublime we already experience due to global warming: shifting weather patterns, extensive glacial melt, more intense rain, major flooding, unpredictable and destructive storms, storm surges. Canadian Marshal McLuhan wrote: 'I think of art, at its most significant as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. "

I hope that my work will motivate the viewer to make a personal response.

These photographs are not about geographical place. They will not be found in any travel brochure. These are not images of a destination. They are pure place in the same sense that there is pure mathematics or pure emotion. You are ‘there’ without any prior complications and it’s sublime. There is no clear sense of direction, no escape by compass. Water, not land, is everywhere. Water in great quantity is falling. It pounds itself into mist. Birds fly serenely above the turbulence to mock human inadequacy. There is danger for the viewer should the foot slip, the engine stop or an ascent to heaven falter. These pictures put you in an emotional state that is without stable government. It is lawless.

Negotiating a family portrait

This is an accurate title for the group of family portraits made over the last decade. It adequately summarises how I think about the act and procedure of making family portraits for public viewing. Each portrait in this group might benefits from a subtitle. I'm keenly aware of the discussions and negotiations of private and public - what to exhibit and what to keep private. (This extends to the decision, not to photograph some event.) Image makers tread this fine line when contributing to the dialogue of family portraiture while revealing something candid but not uncensored.

There is a performative aspect, each person has a sense of contributing to the portrait, simultaneously existing in a private space but aware of being seen publicly.

I love the collaborations with my family. We lead busy, disparate lives - as many families do. These calls to action, for me, exist as very meaningful intersections.

I long for my family members to be the actors in my images but hope that each photograph holds the essence of a genuine, personal event, for each of us.

Fragrant Sweat 1999-2001

Fragrant Sweat is the title of a photographic work compiled in a number of narrative sets. The photographs, each 50x50 cm, stem from my experience as mother of an adolescent daughter, Jess.

My working strategy is neither a candid nor a detached social documentary. I direct, but also collaborate with Jess and her friends, in photo sessions that arise from pre-mediated interventions in various aspects of their lives. Other friendship groups of young people have participated in these tableaus. Conscious of the camera and the an element of anticipation at the possibility of public exhibition of the outcome.

The images have a veracity of the kind that is found in theatre. It has to be distilled from an emotional response to the work. The prospect of autobiography is ever present. The extensive editing has inevitability enunciated a world that I imagine for my daughter with pleasure as much as I anticipate with fear. The work began in 1999 and has extended into 2001 with the support of an artsACT grant.