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Each year, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, stages an exhibition by a prominent artist who has made a significant contribution to Australian contemporary art.

Lyndal Jones's 'Darwin with Tears' was the 2008 incarnation of this annual exhibition, bringing together an extensive body of work that spans Jones's pioneering performance and video practice. Propelled by the artist's distinctive feminist voice – a feature of the Australian Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale – this retrospective was an occasion to observe gender and sex from a female perspective, as well as a rare opportunity to view Jones's sustained interest in exploring the field of evolution.

'Darwin with Tears' was a wholly immersive experience. Beginning immediately inside ACCA's interiors, Prediction piece #10: do not go gentle, 1991–2008, a multiple slide-projection installation, played out like a stream of celestial prophecies on the walls and ceilings of the gallery's reception area. A variety of suggestive texts – such as 'And, as the sun' or 'it will all end in tears' – introduced audiences to Jones's abiding themes of chance and probability...

Commissioned specially for the exhibition, Tears for what was done, 2008, was a remarkable installation prominently displayed on the building's fa¸ade, where the work greeted visitors with 150 forty-four-gallon drums of recycled water handsomely arranged across the forecourt, along with the words, 'tears for what was done'. At night the text was neon-lit and further illuminated in the numerous pools of water below which gathered like bodies of glistening tears. While the work originally stemmed from ideas on Aboriginal reconciliation, its power lies in its capacity for universal resonance.

Not least of all through its title, 'Darwin with Tears' showed how Jones's background in anthropology continues to deeply inform her work. The exhibition also placed particular demands on the viewer common with time-based works, such as the patience required to sit through full cycles of videos, and the challenge of keeping multiple audios from intruding too much on each other. Those who did stay with Jones's conceptually clear works until the end may have been stretched, but the experiential rewards were many.

For this second Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program review, Clarissa Chikiamco was mentored by Lisa Byrne, freelance curator, writer and former Canberra Contemporary Art Space director. Darwin with Tears, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 24 May – 20 July 2008.

 This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue.