Dispatch Review respectfully acknowledges the Whadjuk people as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands upon which we live and work. We pay deep respect to Elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
Reviews:
- Nazila Jahangir, Immigration, by Sam Beard.
- Regenerative Strategies: A Celestial Reflection, by Jess van Heerden.
- Cast in (Mostly) Bronze at AGWA, by Riley Landau.
- Missed Shows and Mini Reviews, by Darren Jorgensen, Riley Landau, Amelia Birch, and Sam Beard.
- 2025 Power 100, by Dispatch Review.
- Dan Bourke, Keywords, AVA, by Francis Russell.
- Revivification at AGWA by Angus Bowskill.
- The Australian Dream and other Fictions, by Jess van Heerden.
- The Vessel Report, by Sam Beard.
- Jacob Kotzee’s flowerfield, by Scott Price.
- Jeff Gibson: False Gestalt, by Francis Russell.
- Skyward, or Boonji Spaceman and the Giant Kebab, by Nick FitzPatrick.
- Sam Bloor and Jesse Marlow: Street Posters 2020–2025, by Sam Beard.
- Mervyn Street: Stolen Wages, by Darren Jorgensen.
- 100 Sculpture Ideas for Sculptures by the Sea, by Rainy Colbert.
- Kate Mitchell’s Idea Induction, by Amelia Birch.
- Mai Nguyễn-Long’s Doba Nation, by Sam Beard.
- A conversation with Jo Darbyshire, by Stirling Kain.
- Dispatch Review’s 2024 Wrap-up.
- The people yearn..., by Max Vickery and Erin Russell.
- An invitation to dance, by Sam Beard.
- We Talk, We Discuss: An Interview with Taring Padi by Max Vickery.
- AGWA x PrideFEST by Felicity Bean.
- Tim Meakins, Body Mould by Sam Beard.
- Nick FitzPatrick, Hero Image by Francis Russell.
- Jacob Kotzee, Arrangements by Dan Glover.
- Hollow Icons: Desmond Mah at Mossenson by Darren Jorgensen.
- Pilgrimage: An interview with Vedika Rampal.
- The UnAustralian: Doubling Double Nation – An interview with Rex Butler.
- Negative Criticism: A Year of Dispatch Review by Tara Heffernan.
- Custodians as Reverse Monument by Darren Jorgensen.
- End of History – LWAG by Francis Russell.
- Hatched Dispatched 2024 by Dan Glover, Jess van Heerden, Nalinie See & Sam Beard.
- David Bromfield: A critic at large and ‘Where did the artists go?’
- Me, Also Me by Sam Beard.
- Paper Trails Between Lion and Swan by Sam Beard.
- Ceramically Speaking by Ben Yaxley.
- The Strelley Mob by Sam Harper.
- Rone: The Mighty Success by Leslie Thompson.
- Paper Trails: An interview with Yeo Chee Kiong by Sam Beard.
- 2024 Power 100 by Dispatch Review.
- Foresight & Fiction by Ben Yaxley.
- Twin Peaks Was 30 by Matthew Taggart.
- Breaking News: It’s Rone! by Sam Beard.
- Look, looking at Anna Park by Amelia Birch.
- The Fan by Francis Russell.
- Follower, Leader by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Wanneroo Warholamania by Sam Beard.
- Death Metal Summer by Sam Beard.
- Players, Places: Reprised, Renewed, Reviewed by Aimee Dodds.
- Scholtz: Two Worlds Apart by Corderoy, Fisher, Flaherty, Wilson, Fletcher, Jorgensen, & Glover.
- Partial Sightings by Sam Beard.
- True! Crime. by Aimee Dodds.
- The Human Condition by Rex Butler.
- Rebecca Baumann’s Light Event by Sam Beard.
- Rejoinder: Archival / Activism by Max Vickery.
- Access and Denial in The Purple Shall Govern by Jess van Heerden.
- 4Spells by Sam Beard.
- Abstract art, DMT capitalism and the ugliness of David Attwood’s paintings
by Darren Jorgensen. - Unearthing new epistemologies of extraction by Samuel Beilby.
- Seek Wisdom by Max Vickery.
- Something for Everyone by Sam Beard.
- Violent Sludge by Aimee Dodds.
- State of Abstraction by Francis Russell.
- Double Histories: Special Issue, with texts by Ian McLean, Terry Smith, and Darren Jorgensen & Sam Beard.
- Six Missing Shows by Sam Beard.
- What We Memorialise by Max Vickery.
- At the End of the Land by Amelia Birch.
- The beautiful is useful by Sam Beard.
- ām / ammā / mā maram by Zali Morgan.
- Making Ground, Breaking Ground by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Art as Asset by Sam Beard.
- Cactus Malpractice by Aimee Dodds.
- Sweet sweet pea by Sam Beard.
- COBRA by Francis Russell.
- PICA Barn by Sam Beard .
- Gallery Hotel Metro by Aimee Dodds.
- A Stroll Through the Sacred, Profane, and Bizarre by Samuel Beilby.
- Filling in the Gaps at Spacingout by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Disneyland Cosmoplitanism by Sam Beard.
- Discovering Revenue by Amelia Birch.
- Uncomfortable Borrowing by Jess van Heerden.
- It’s Not That Strange by Stirling Kain.
- Hatched Dispatched 2023 by Sam Beard & Aimee Dodds.
- Fuck the Class System by Jess van Heerden, Jacinta Posik, Darren Jorgensen, et al.
- Wild About Nothing by Sam Beard.
- Paranoiac, Peripatetic: Pet Projects by Aimee Dodds.
- An Odd Moment for Women’s Art by Maraya Takoniatis.
- Transmutations by Sam Beard.
- The Post-Vandal by Sam Beard.
- Art Thugs and Humbugs by Max Vickery.
- Disneyland, Paris, Ardross and the artworld by Darren Jorgensen.
- Bizarrely, A Biennale by Aimee Dodds.
- Venus in Tullamarine by Sam Beard.
- Weird Rituals by Sam Beard.
- Random Cube by Francis Russell.
- Yeah, Nah, Rockpool by Aimee Dodds.
- Towards a Blind Horizon by Kieron Broadhurst.
- Being Realistic by Sam Beard.
Less than two weeks ago, ABC News brought us the exciting
announcement that Australian researchers, in a world first, are finalising a
prototype designed to carry plants and seeds to the moon. The ALEPH (Australian
Lunar Experiment Promoting Horticulture) project lead, Lauren Fell, expressed
the team’s optimism for the project following recent testing, where prototypes
containing brassicas were exposed to radiation levels equivalent to four days,
eight days, and five years on the moon.[1] She suggested that by 2026,
ALEPH will be able to keep plants alive for the whole journey to the moon, and
possibly even several days post-landing.[2] Promising first steps in the
emerging field of lunar horticulture. The mission, backed by the Australian
Space Agency, is currently scheduled to launch in March or April of next year.
What a lovely idea. A lush field of purple moon broccoli swaying across cheesy fields is a storybook illustrator’s delight. But why the interest in moon-grown food? Why not simply bring supplies from Earth, the good old method that has worked since 1969? Perfectly sufficient. Unless there are bigger agendas than moon travel at stake in this project. In a separate ABC News Radio interview, the interviewer (unnamed where the broadcast is available online) candidly asked Fell: ‘So if we are to live there, somewhere on the moon, if we are to colonise it, as you say we’re going to need to eat.’ This was shortly followed by a giggly, ‘I wonder if it [broccoli] would taste different, on the moon?’[3] It is a natural leap, the ABC interviewer’s nonchalant attitude suggests, to progress from moon exploration to moon exploitation.
Australia is not the only government with its sights on interterritorial expansion. In August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s Vikram lander became the first successfully soft-landed spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.[4] This came four years after India’s first failed attempt and three days after Russia’s Luna 25 went off course and crashed into the moon’s surface at over 200 km/h (the crater resulting from the damage was conveniently captured via satellite imagery and published neatly as “before and after” photographs—thanks, NASA).[5] The rover dispensed from the belly of Chandrayaan-3, Pragyaan (‘wisdom’ in Sanskrit), shut down 12 days after beginning exploration, unable to withstand freezing overnight temperatures in the south pole of the moon.[6]
Decades of inactivity followed NASA’s breakthrough moon landings. In fact, this is exactly what the head of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) blamed Russia’s 2023 failure on: ‘[…] lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research […]’[7] So, why now for the space race 2.0; what is suddenly so enticing about the moon’s southern pole? Simple. Ice. Lots more of it than NASA first thought when it broadcast the find to couch-sitters across the globe in 1996.[8] Ice, of course, is the loveable solid form of our blue planet favourite, H₂O, meaning a substantial supply of oxygen and rocket fuel (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen). I don’t know very much about space travel, but I am aware that getting a rocket to one of those potentially habitable planets, like Mars, demands an unimaginably large amount of fuel. The energy required to transport this fuel from Earth—where that pesky gravity thing runs rife—seems to be one of the key barriers to achieving the ex-White House bestie’s claims that a crewed mission to Mars is possible by 2029, and a ‘self-sustaining colony’ (again with the “c” word) will exist there within ‘twenty to thirty years.’[9]
Could moon mining provide the solution? A convenient low-gravity base of untapped resources? And, it would seem, the Tasmanian-sized lunar territory remains up for grabs. The US Government certainly thinks so. It has for several years now. In 2019, the orange-sprayed, red-tied man—who proved in April that he wears navy suits even to Popes’ funerals—proudly announced an expansion of US military operations (it was big, really big, maybe the biggest ever). Said man introduced the “US Space Force” and “US Space Command”, explaining of these new military organisations: ‘Space. Gonna be a lot of things happening in space. Space is the world’s newest war fighting domain.’[10]
Even when scheming of interplanetary habitation (a dream made possible by a new set of resources to exploit), Trump fell victim to Earth-centric linguistics. He said ‘the world’ but meant ‘everywhere’. But for how long will the Earth be the default measure? Is it not a matter of time until we cut our losses? One planet ruined, on to the next. More, more, more, just around the corner. This trajectory has already been set into motion. Have we not been building to this for years and years and years? How could it not be our inevitable next?
Maybe we are a century away from headlines boasting Milky Way firsts: Within a hundred years of watching politicians nod sombrely about our precious, one-of-a-kind, solar system before announcing an additional five-year delay to the latest hydrocarbon emission-cutting scheme; less than triple digits off tutting in enraged dismay when it’s revealed that a trusted councillor used our taxes to get home for supper in a private spacecraft (he should face the Martian traffic like the rest of us); A breath away from domestic and international airfares denoting intra- and inter-Earth flights. But that’s probably the Earth-centric thinking (I’m a product of my time). Even Styrofoam primary school diagrams know that Earth is an outer planet. Far less central than Mars or Jupiter, say. A distant brown station (it used to be blue and green, did you say? I’m not that gullible). A once-productive hub for coal and iron ore and that liquid ice stuff (there might have been other things that happened there too, but they’ve slipped from official records). Another deserted mining town. Those who could afford to get away, did. Those who couldn’t? We lost track. Nothing to name a transport system around. A stopover point—nasty, industrial place—for nostalgic tourists to tell tales about free oxygen from the comfort of their Club Med enclosures (okay, Grandma, let’s get you back to bed). A place we used to dump the debris until it got too full. Not to worry, waste management prospects are looking bright in the light of recent cross-galaxy expeditions. Limited resources plague only those old-school, theoretical economists. Or, perhaps, time flows in many directions. Are not trajectories superimposed? Mere fictions of linearity established after the fact. Gian Manik, and the 250-plus school children who participated in Regenerative Strategies, seem to suggest so.
The ambitious project, which represented Vessel’s inaugural exhibition, saw the Naarm-based (former Boorloo local) painter collaborate with Year Ones and Twos from eight surrounding primary schools. Each school group participated in workshops where they were encouraged to “depict imagery from their immediate environment.” Although working within parameters denoting colour palette and brush size, the students remained free to respond as they wished, building tapestries of landscape by adding to one another’s work. The artist then added his own oil and charcoal marks to join the children’s acrylic. When reading the media release for the project, I was sceptical about encountering tokenism. How could a professional artist seamlessly place their work alongside the ad hoc bursts and inventive shapes of children’s drawings? Quite honestly, I anticipated that I would come across little more than smouldering remains of students’ work, kept well at bay by formal structures imposed to order and refine. But Manik’s thinned washes sweep over, under, across, and around in equal measure. So much so that it becomes difficult to tell which marks lay beneath or above. Which came before, or after?
In Erosion Control Solutions, for example, luscious shrubs, in bouts of earthy lime, sprout in and around an assembly of inorganic slabs. The 200 x 300 cm oil, acrylic, and charcoal is the product of Manik and East Fremantle Primary School’s joint efforts to capture a faltering coastal front. The surely certain concreteness of each unfeeling structure is undermined by the growths that softly litter the composition. The artist, in turn, tones down vibrant hues with sweeping marks across the surface, and adds his own bursts of neon colour to match the naïve periwinkles and strong red-browns that eager student artists had not the time to mix. Visible layering of imagery evokes the notion of distant memories and unfolding dreams, calling into question which forms are present and which seem as though they are from another time or place. There are instances, too, where Manik clearly adds his own mark-making. Decisive sketches that hold their ground. Consider the scattering of bright, bubblegum-pink marks building across the bottom left to right of the composition. Yet even these have origins in the playful splatters of paint that hang excitedly off flurried forms, and the friendly, reaching shapes of illustrated children’s book trees. The artist’s marks are not a point of contrast. Rather, his more careful, controlled interventions are pared back by the inclusion of sporadic linework. The offerings of Manik’s brush are made to feel level with the children’s joyful counterparts. Even in Carbon Poems, the most figuratively structured work in the exhibition, tumbling slippage continues. This work, created alongside the young artists of Lance Holt Primary School, depicts three dominant elements: two winding mangrove trees and a section of riverside thicket. Yet pulsing throughout the work are ivory lines evocative of settling tides, shadowy blue river maps, and miniature trees with rounded bursts of foliage. One need pause only for a second to adjust our eyes and encounter swarms of shape, colour, and line. Markers of the work’s unfolding history.
Each exhibited work offers an enchanting collapse of composition. Structures like “near and far” and “past, present, and future” are rendered obsolete. We cannot rely on pictorial conventions to guide us through each thronging sea of harmonious chaos. Instead, we need to seek out alternative ways of navigating and relating. Regenerative Strategies responds to looming apocalypse not with dystopian angst, but rather a reminder to recentralise the present. Manik appeals to us to think first of today’s children before tomorrow’s. He reminds us that the present is where the future is made and unmade. Such is forwarded by Timmah Ball’s poetic responses. The nine verses that constitute The Children’s Book of Planning are charted against each work. While they tread the nuanced theme that each painting offers, there is throughout, a unifying urge to turn them upside down. In some of Ball’s micro-narratives, illogical outcomes are entertained, calling into question the certainty of long-withstanding foundations. Like New Directions, where treehouses sprout to quell both urban sprawl and extinction threats to longed-for shade. In others, accepted practices are worn down to their ridiculous cores. Ball asks us to pay attention to, and learn from, children: thinkers and dreamers who have not yet embodied the patterns so naturalised to many adults that we no longer see them.
What might such thinking mean when more widely applied? Let’s return to the news cycle: ALEPH and its moon plants. Interestingly, it was primary school children who set the project of plants on the moon into motion. Before ALEPH was an acremen, the Australian Space Agency were deciding what they would put millions of dollars towards sending up to the big cheese. Team leader Fell recalled in an interview with ABC that the surveyed kids’ delight in living plants on the moon was the birthplace of the groundbreaking project.[11] What would it mean if we took the playful thinking of Regenerative Strategies a step further. For the moon, at least, it could mean that legacies need not be prophecies. It might mean that the Australian Space Agency’s research leads to edible plants grown in places exposed to radiation (war zones or nuclear sites), or that grown, high-protein substances replace the need for meat and overcome issues of methane release and threats to biodiversity whilst feeding growing populations (drawing from similar research like the Gaia Project).[12] In the face of climate catastrophe well in motion, Regenerative Strategies is a reminder of the importance of earnestly considering alternatives—the urgent need to let playfulness guide us as we continue to make a future. Regenerative Strategies suggests that perhaps there are options half-hidden in the most familiar of places, if we’d only think to probe.
Regenerative Strategies by Gian Manik at Vessel Contemporary until 10 August 2025.
Footnotes:
1. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” YouTube Video, 2:43, posted by ABC News, June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE
2. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE
3. This page has become unavailable since a few days ago when the article written. It used to be found at this link, which now is unfortunately met with an error code, apologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-17/australian-scientists-aiming-to-grow-plants-on-the-moon/105425836
4. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” The Guardian, accessed July 1, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission
5. “NASA’s LRO Observes Crater Likely from Luna 25 Impact,” NASA, accessed Jul7 1, 2025, https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasas-lro-observes-crater-likely-from-luna-25-impact/
6. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission
7. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission
8. “Why we need to mine the Moon,” filmed 2024, YouTube Video, 8:06, posted by ABC If You’re Listening, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUy3lxnIuBo
9. “Musk Predicts Timeline for When Humans Can Travel to Mars,” filmed March 2025, YouTube Video, 0:30, posted by WSJ News, March 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lnRGL--NV0
10. “Donald Trump launches space force for 'world’s new war-fighting domain',’ filmed 2019, YouTube Video, 0:02, posted by The Guardian, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qylzX5r8Z8M
11. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE
12. “Gaia Project Australia,” La Trobe University, accessed July 1, 2025, https://www.latrobe.edu.au/industry-and-community/la-trobe-industry/case-studies/gaia-project-australia
Images: Gian Manik, Regenerative Strategies at Vessel Contemporary, photography by Guy Louden.
What a lovely idea. A lush field of purple moon broccoli swaying across cheesy fields is a storybook illustrator’s delight. But why the interest in moon-grown food? Why not simply bring supplies from Earth, the good old method that has worked since 1969? Perfectly sufficient. Unless there are bigger agendas than moon travel at stake in this project. In a separate ABC News Radio interview, the interviewer (unnamed where the broadcast is available online) candidly asked Fell: ‘So if we are to live there, somewhere on the moon, if we are to colonise it, as you say we’re going to need to eat.’ This was shortly followed by a giggly, ‘I wonder if it [broccoli] would taste different, on the moon?’[3] It is a natural leap, the ABC interviewer’s nonchalant attitude suggests, to progress from moon exploration to moon exploitation.
Australia is not the only government with its sights on interterritorial expansion. In August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s Vikram lander became the first successfully soft-landed spacecraft near the south pole of the moon.[4] This came four years after India’s first failed attempt and three days after Russia’s Luna 25 went off course and crashed into the moon’s surface at over 200 km/h (the crater resulting from the damage was conveniently captured via satellite imagery and published neatly as “before and after” photographs—thanks, NASA).[5] The rover dispensed from the belly of Chandrayaan-3, Pragyaan (‘wisdom’ in Sanskrit), shut down 12 days after beginning exploration, unable to withstand freezing overnight temperatures in the south pole of the moon.[6]
Decades of inactivity followed NASA’s breakthrough moon landings. In fact, this is exactly what the head of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) blamed Russia’s 2023 failure on: ‘[…] lack of expertise due to the long break in lunar research […]’[7] So, why now for the space race 2.0; what is suddenly so enticing about the moon’s southern pole? Simple. Ice. Lots more of it than NASA first thought when it broadcast the find to couch-sitters across the globe in 1996.[8] Ice, of course, is the loveable solid form of our blue planet favourite, H₂O, meaning a substantial supply of oxygen and rocket fuel (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen). I don’t know very much about space travel, but I am aware that getting a rocket to one of those potentially habitable planets, like Mars, demands an unimaginably large amount of fuel. The energy required to transport this fuel from Earth—where that pesky gravity thing runs rife—seems to be one of the key barriers to achieving the ex-White House bestie’s claims that a crewed mission to Mars is possible by 2029, and a ‘self-sustaining colony’ (again with the “c” word) will exist there within ‘twenty to thirty years.’[9]
Could moon mining provide the solution? A convenient low-gravity base of untapped resources? And, it would seem, the Tasmanian-sized lunar territory remains up for grabs. The US Government certainly thinks so. It has for several years now. In 2019, the orange-sprayed, red-tied man—who proved in April that he wears navy suits even to Popes’ funerals—proudly announced an expansion of US military operations (it was big, really big, maybe the biggest ever). Said man introduced the “US Space Force” and “US Space Command”, explaining of these new military organisations: ‘Space. Gonna be a lot of things happening in space. Space is the world’s newest war fighting domain.’[10]
Even when scheming of interplanetary habitation (a dream made possible by a new set of resources to exploit), Trump fell victim to Earth-centric linguistics. He said ‘the world’ but meant ‘everywhere’. But for how long will the Earth be the default measure? Is it not a matter of time until we cut our losses? One planet ruined, on to the next. More, more, more, just around the corner. This trajectory has already been set into motion. Have we not been building to this for years and years and years? How could it not be our inevitable next?
Maybe we are a century away from headlines boasting Milky Way firsts: Within a hundred years of watching politicians nod sombrely about our precious, one-of-a-kind, solar system before announcing an additional five-year delay to the latest hydrocarbon emission-cutting scheme; less than triple digits off tutting in enraged dismay when it’s revealed that a trusted councillor used our taxes to get home for supper in a private spacecraft (he should face the Martian traffic like the rest of us); A breath away from domestic and international airfares denoting intra- and inter-Earth flights. But that’s probably the Earth-centric thinking (I’m a product of my time). Even Styrofoam primary school diagrams know that Earth is an outer planet. Far less central than Mars or Jupiter, say. A distant brown station (it used to be blue and green, did you say? I’m not that gullible). A once-productive hub for coal and iron ore and that liquid ice stuff (there might have been other things that happened there too, but they’ve slipped from official records). Another deserted mining town. Those who could afford to get away, did. Those who couldn’t? We lost track. Nothing to name a transport system around. A stopover point—nasty, industrial place—for nostalgic tourists to tell tales about free oxygen from the comfort of their Club Med enclosures (okay, Grandma, let’s get you back to bed). A place we used to dump the debris until it got too full. Not to worry, waste management prospects are looking bright in the light of recent cross-galaxy expeditions. Limited resources plague only those old-school, theoretical economists. Or, perhaps, time flows in many directions. Are not trajectories superimposed? Mere fictions of linearity established after the fact. Gian Manik, and the 250-plus school children who participated in Regenerative Strategies, seem to suggest so.
The ambitious project, which represented Vessel’s inaugural exhibition, saw the Naarm-based (former Boorloo local) painter collaborate with Year Ones and Twos from eight surrounding primary schools. Each school group participated in workshops where they were encouraged to “depict imagery from their immediate environment.” Although working within parameters denoting colour palette and brush size, the students remained free to respond as they wished, building tapestries of landscape by adding to one another’s work. The artist then added his own oil and charcoal marks to join the children’s acrylic. When reading the media release for the project, I was sceptical about encountering tokenism. How could a professional artist seamlessly place their work alongside the ad hoc bursts and inventive shapes of children’s drawings? Quite honestly, I anticipated that I would come across little more than smouldering remains of students’ work, kept well at bay by formal structures imposed to order and refine. But Manik’s thinned washes sweep over, under, across, and around in equal measure. So much so that it becomes difficult to tell which marks lay beneath or above. Which came before, or after?
In Erosion Control Solutions, for example, luscious shrubs, in bouts of earthy lime, sprout in and around an assembly of inorganic slabs. The 200 x 300 cm oil, acrylic, and charcoal is the product of Manik and East Fremantle Primary School’s joint efforts to capture a faltering coastal front. The surely certain concreteness of each unfeeling structure is undermined by the growths that softly litter the composition. The artist, in turn, tones down vibrant hues with sweeping marks across the surface, and adds his own bursts of neon colour to match the naïve periwinkles and strong red-browns that eager student artists had not the time to mix. Visible layering of imagery evokes the notion of distant memories and unfolding dreams, calling into question which forms are present and which seem as though they are from another time or place. There are instances, too, where Manik clearly adds his own mark-making. Decisive sketches that hold their ground. Consider the scattering of bright, bubblegum-pink marks building across the bottom left to right of the composition. Yet even these have origins in the playful splatters of paint that hang excitedly off flurried forms, and the friendly, reaching shapes of illustrated children’s book trees. The artist’s marks are not a point of contrast. Rather, his more careful, controlled interventions are pared back by the inclusion of sporadic linework. The offerings of Manik’s brush are made to feel level with the children’s joyful counterparts. Even in Carbon Poems, the most figuratively structured work in the exhibition, tumbling slippage continues. This work, created alongside the young artists of Lance Holt Primary School, depicts three dominant elements: two winding mangrove trees and a section of riverside thicket. Yet pulsing throughout the work are ivory lines evocative of settling tides, shadowy blue river maps, and miniature trees with rounded bursts of foliage. One need pause only for a second to adjust our eyes and encounter swarms of shape, colour, and line. Markers of the work’s unfolding history.
Each exhibited work offers an enchanting collapse of composition. Structures like “near and far” and “past, present, and future” are rendered obsolete. We cannot rely on pictorial conventions to guide us through each thronging sea of harmonious chaos. Instead, we need to seek out alternative ways of navigating and relating. Regenerative Strategies responds to looming apocalypse not with dystopian angst, but rather a reminder to recentralise the present. Manik appeals to us to think first of today’s children before tomorrow’s. He reminds us that the present is where the future is made and unmade. Such is forwarded by Timmah Ball’s poetic responses. The nine verses that constitute The Children’s Book of Planning are charted against each work. While they tread the nuanced theme that each painting offers, there is throughout, a unifying urge to turn them upside down. In some of Ball’s micro-narratives, illogical outcomes are entertained, calling into question the certainty of long-withstanding foundations. Like New Directions, where treehouses sprout to quell both urban sprawl and extinction threats to longed-for shade. In others, accepted practices are worn down to their ridiculous cores. Ball asks us to pay attention to, and learn from, children: thinkers and dreamers who have not yet embodied the patterns so naturalised to many adults that we no longer see them.
What might such thinking mean when more widely applied? Let’s return to the news cycle: ALEPH and its moon plants. Interestingly, it was primary school children who set the project of plants on the moon into motion. Before ALEPH was an acremen, the Australian Space Agency were deciding what they would put millions of dollars towards sending up to the big cheese. Team leader Fell recalled in an interview with ABC that the surveyed kids’ delight in living plants on the moon was the birthplace of the groundbreaking project.[11] What would it mean if we took the playful thinking of Regenerative Strategies a step further. For the moon, at least, it could mean that legacies need not be prophecies. It might mean that the Australian Space Agency’s research leads to edible plants grown in places exposed to radiation (war zones or nuclear sites), or that grown, high-protein substances replace the need for meat and overcome issues of methane release and threats to biodiversity whilst feeding growing populations (drawing from similar research like the Gaia Project).[12] In the face of climate catastrophe well in motion, Regenerative Strategies is a reminder of the importance of earnestly considering alternatives—the urgent need to let playfulness guide us as we continue to make a future. Regenerative Strategies suggests that perhaps there are options half-hidden in the most familiar of places, if we’d only think to probe.
Regenerative Strategies by Gian Manik at Vessel Contemporary until 10 August 2025.
Footnotes:
1. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” YouTube Video, 2:43, posted by ABC News, June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE
2. “These Australian scientists are trying to grow plants on the moon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8seTjykfNE
3. This page has become unavailable since a few days ago when the article written. It used to be found at this link, which now is unfortunately met with an error code, apologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-17/australian-scientists-aiming-to-grow-plants-on-the-moon/105425836
4. “India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first,” The Guardian, accessed July 1, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/23/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-mission
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Images: Gian Manik, Regenerative Strategies at Vessel Contemporary, photography by Guy Louden.