by Hannah Hutchison

Seven concentric charcoal circles hover; their once-glowing, now-blackened fragments precisely shaped into a suspended system of halos. Regenerator (2021) is conceived as a filter for the city, harnessing the properties of charcoal to detoxify, energise, repair and revive the space around it.

Melbourne-based artists Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler make installations, sculpture and ephemeral interventions that explore humanity’s relationship with the environment. In recent years, the duo have researched and worked with charcoal to develop a deep understanding of the material. For thousands of years charcoal has been used around the world in art, health, culinary practice and agricultural systems, and is commonly used to filter and detoxify. In Bae’s native South Korea charcoal is used domestically to cleanse the air in a room – it is considered a purifier, a protector, a part of daily life. In Australia, the pair’s home, new plant life emerges from charred bushland, encouraged by fire-borne cues.

The artists believe that every object, every space and every living entity has an embodied energy. In the lead up to The National 2021, Bae and Lawler spent time observing movement through the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ entrance court and surveying the building’s greater geographical context. This informed the concept for Regenerator, a work that harnesses the natural flow and energy of the space. The alignment of the charcoal circles forms a clear linearity within the work, creating a conduit for air and energy to be filtered. As energy passes through each ring, it is increasingly invigorated. This invisible field of energy amplifies and radiates out of the far end of the work, towards Woolloomooloo.

Weaving between the pendulous charcoal rings, the viewer has the freedom to experience Regenerator from within. From afar, the dark circular forms seem solid, however a closer look at their accreted charcoal surfaces reveals repetition in form and texture. Like vision adjusting to a darkened room, graduated shades of black emerge as ambient light softly glistens off hundreds of jagged shards of charcoal. Bae and Lawler use repetition in their work as a signifier of life and abundance in the natural world.

Over the years, the pair have garnered forms and patterns found in nature and distilled them into a geometric and abstracted language. As the artists explain, Regenerator adopts a circular configuration much like ‘a capillary wave found in a ripple on the water, evoking ideas relating to causality and self-regulating balance between living entities’. (1) The circle, a harmonious form that appears throughout Bae and Lawler’s practice, signifies balance and the cyclical nature of life. Their works often search for balance, acting on their concern over political, environmental and social imbalance. During Regenerator’s creation, the duo took this concept beyond the gallery walls, creating a series of site-specific ephemeral charcoal interventions installed throughout the surrounding landscape that capture and cycle energy back to Regenerator.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, what it means to detoxify, repair and revive has shifted. Regenerator, forged from fire and quietly suspended, does not provide an answer to what those concepts now mean, but instead a lens through which new meanings and balance might be found.

     
(1) This quote and information in this article were taken from interviews and emails between the artists and author, Dec 2020 to Feb 2021.