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The 10th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art explores artists' responses to aspects of contemporary life that have the potential to generate disquiet, to divide communities and incite debate. During the research process, curator Felicity Fenner held a discussion with some of the artists around shared themes in their work. Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, James Darling and Lesley Forwood, Dennis Del Favero, Janet Laurence, James Newitt and Kate Rohde joined the conversation.
 
Felicity Fenner (FF): My aim in curating the exhibition was to offer a range of fresh voices and for this reason I based the selection on artists both whose practice refers directly to current issues and who have never before been included in the Biennial.
A large proportion of the work is focussed quite specifically on the Australian viewpoint, because for me the role of an exhibition restricted to being national as opposed to international in content is to reveal concerns about and attitudes to the place in which the artists live and work. The desire to describe something of the country's mood of course runs counter to our post-war quest to define aspects of national identity through art. In contrast, what has occurred in Australian art over the last generation is an unravelling of nationality: as local issues such as the environment and immigration become more urgent, artists have widened their focus to address these in a global context.
Your work, Janet, for example, encapsulates this approach: the inverted tree in need of intensive care eloquently summarises the vulnerable state not only of our Australian natural environment but that of the world's fragile position, both ecologically and politically.
 
Janet Laurence (JL): I think that art through breadth of language and its aesthetic has the potential to facilitate broad public engagement, empathy and knowledge of the environments in which we live, especially, in terms of my work, in regard to ecological issues. I hope that with works such as the one I've made for the Biennial it's possible for art to have rather a remedial role by creating an awareness of transformation and regeneration.
 
FF: How does this new installation relate to your research into forests here and abroad?
 
JL: It belongs to a group of recent works that explores and reveals the fragility of specific ecological sites, in which endangered and destroyed landscapes become the subject and site for suggested revival and life support strategies.
 
FF: A majority of the work in the exhibition centres around ideas of fragility and much of it, including yours Janet, encompasses the notion of fragility not only in concept but also in its material form. Kate, your fabricated creatures are also delicate in form and, like Janet's, seem to allude to a threat of ecological disaster. Yet while Janet's work is often designed for the public domain, yours, by being presented in traditional glass cases, is purposely relegated to the status of museum spectacle
 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2008 issue.