chloe watfern

A collaborative project developed by artist Guy Fredericks, Studio A, Dr Chloe Watfern, and MAG&M, Bleeding Hearts and Morning Glory is a socially engaged exhibition that encourages people with intellectual disability to participate in conversations about climate change and care for place.

Here is the catalogue essay I wrote:

Tending the World

Guy Fredericks has been tending the world through his art for many years now. He has been quietly, carefully, reverently making delicate drawings, paintings and sculptures of all kinds of creatures, from blue-ringed octopi to beagles. He once worked in a plant nursery, and has a Certificate III in Parks and Gardens, and a Certificate II in General Horticulture. Now, working at Studio A, he is the resident recycler, reclaiming any salvageable waste from the rubbish bin, and making sure each category of recyclable finds its way to the right place.

More and more, Guy’s creative work has taken on an element of advocacy: he wants to raise awareness about what’s happening to the environment. For example, his 2022 sculpture Earthenseed was a response to the climate emergency. The sculpture is, in Guy’s words “a planetary atmospheric seed that harbours life… The tree is struggling…but it’s not beyond saving and just needs a bit of help from mankind.”

“It’s like you’re looking down at the world from above”, said Ben, one of a team of neurodivergent environmental workers from Bushlink, who joined us for an art workshop in late August 2023. He was looking hard at a picture of Guy’s artwork, then back up to Guy, then down again at the printout. We had already met this man, wearing the same uniform of high-vis orange fleece, on a previous visit to a site less than a kilometre away - a slim corridor of bushland between main roads between Gayamaygal and Garigal Country in Curl Curl, on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Then, he had shown us how their team tend to the wild (and not-so-wild) places in our midst, like the bank where we stood beside a small bridge connecting an oval to a bowling club, spotted with Banksia, Acacia and Lomandra.

They had spent that morning pulling out the Morning Glory, that ubiquitous but destructive weed with beautiful purple flowers. If you let it go it strangles the trees, cutting out sunlight to the middle stories and undergrowth. The Bushlink team pull the vines up from their roots, which criss-cross the ground, and not from the leafy parts that twist around the other plants. Then, they wind the vines up like lassoes and hang them from branches or push them into the mesh wire of a border fence, where they dry out and can’t regrow. As we went walking together towards the main road, past the lagoon, we noticed dozens of lassoes hanging all along the track: a sign of the care these workers have taken of this small parcel of bush over the years. We collected a few, which Guy took back with him to the studio. They seemed to us like ready-made sculptures. For me, their tangled but looping forms evoked something hard to articulate about the mess of this climate era, and how we might each respond.

“What do you think about climate change, Guy?” Ben from Bushlink asked as we gently edged into our workshop that August morning. “Do you think we should take action? Guy, what’s climate change?”

Guy gently ignored the first part of the question and focused on the second. Perhaps it’s an easier one to answer. “People have observed the weather over a long period of time,” he explained. “They’ve noticed significant changes in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels...” Guy continued to deliver a highly accurate and convincing analysis of the effects of climatic changes on various elements of contemporary life, and then he moved adeptly into the task at hand – to pay homage to the lassoes that we had gathered on the table before us, some already worked into and woven by Guy and Emma Johnston, his long-time supporter at Studio A, others picked straight from the Bushlink regeneration site.

The seed of this project was the fact that people with intellectual disability – like Guy Fredericks, like the team at Bushlink – are rarely included in conversations about climate change. I’ve dug into this in the research literature. Everything published about climate change and people with intellectual disability (spoiler alert, there are 13 academic articles in total), focus on increased risks during the natural disasters that are induced and exacerbated by global warming. In other words, people with intellectual disability face higher rates of injury, more long-term effects on mental health and wellbeing, and less inclusion in preparation efforts.

However, little has been said, made, written, sung – you name it – that helps balance this narrative. What about the stories of love, imagination, and care? And how might people with intellectual disability lead conversations about a topic like climate change? It is something that is notoriously hard to talk about; so abstract and global and diffuse. We had a hunch that the answer might lie in this tree, or that plant; an atmospheric seed; a morning glory lasso. We all need something concrete to bring us back to earth.

And so, in our small group around some trestle tables on the last day of winter, we continued to talk as we started to draw and weave and fiddle with the lassoes laid out on the table before us. The Bushlink team told us about encounters with birds and dogs while on the job. They told us more about what they do: lopping and pulling, pruning, and trowelling; giving plants space to grow. “The worst part of it,” said one man, “is not coming back to that specific site. I feel like I’m making it an art form, but I’m not going to see it again.”

By the end of our few hours together, all kinds of things had emerged. Ben started drawing a lasso, but then it became a nest, and then a tree in the sky on a windy day, the leaves flying everywhere, and a mother bird protecting her babies. Tarek traced the shadows cast by the Morning Glory on a white sheet of paper: like a flower or the sun, like waves on water. Dylan noticed that the curves of the vine looked like flames, so he started adding detail. It was a lasso on fire.

Our exhibition takes these conversations, these images, as its starting point. Guy and I and Gabrielle Mordy and Emma Johnston from Studio A continued to think and speak and make. Guy continued to draw. With Studio A, he also connected with the team at Glassworks in Canberra. There, he learnt about turning his drawings and sculptures into fragile, luminous things made from recycled bottles and the offcuts from other glass projects.

Dylan’s Morning Glory lasso on fire held our attention over the weeks and months following the workshop. What would it look like in glass? What shadows would it cast? It seemed to carry a nub, an essence of the story we were trying to visualise: forged in heat; precious but breakable…

This is just the beginning. I haven’t even mentioned the Bleeding Hearts yet! We noticed them on that first visit to the Bushlink site. Over the main road there was a patchwork of three distinct fields: one where lantana shrub had taken over, another where it was removed years ago allowing for a beautiful banksia scrub ecosystem to grow up, and a third that had been recently bulldozed. This third field was covered in small seedlings of Homalanthus Populifolios (common name Bleeding Heart), a native Australian plant that tends to come up as a pioneer species in areas that have been disturbed by human activity. A nursery plant, it provides shade for other native seeds to grow.

Like the tree emerging from Guy’s planetary atmospheric seed, this broken, sometimes burning world of ours is not beyond saving, although it’s certainly in need of tending. Thankfully, there are plenty of kind and creative Homo Sapiens to help it out.

If they lose their soft parts they die

My son, five years old, told me this about coral once. And I wondered, if our whole earth is a brain, then what are we, its soft sentient parts?

In ancient texts, corals were described as minerals, stones, a type of tree, and as a living thing of a third nature- neither animal nor plant. Photosynthetic dinoflagellates, coral polyp clones connected by animate tissue, these organisms’ holobionts embrace bacteria, fungi, and virus. And me?

As I made this work I thought about the slow expulsion of colour as our reefs die, as ice melts, as the atmosphere changes. Holding this grief, I looked for connection to all that I do not want to lose.

I invited my children to re-animate images in books saved from landfill and used their marks to find a child’s wonder at the beauty of this world.

The work was a finalist in the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Awards 2023 and exhibited at the Manly Art Gallery & Museum.

Eco-anxiety, climate distress, solastalgia; an ever-expanding glossary of terms have entered our lexicon to describe the kinds of grief, worry, and despair that people feel in the face of escalating natural disasters, ecological loss, and government inaction on climate change.

This project aims to catalyse conversations – from small to large, both private and public – that consider how climate change affects our innermost thoughts and feelings.

How can we live and act in a way that allows people and the planet to flourish? How can social, cultural, and psychological forces be of service (and stand witness) to our ecological selves – the interconnected meshwork that constitutes each person and the ecosystems of which they are fundamentally a part?

Tentacular is a physical expression of our creative, lateral, exploratory thinking about how to address these questions. It evolved from previous community projects using the body as a frame to understand climate emotions.

The Tentacular body is part human, part cephalopod, part bird, part fungi, and part landscape. During a residency at The Ethics Centre, we invited close collaborators, including artists, psychologists, researchers, and Elders, to contribute to Tentacular. We asked each collaborator to share a story of care for place, self, and/or community in the context of the climate crisis.

Many of their stories held something from all three domains – expressions of sorrow, love, hope, rage, advocacy, and connection to place.

Creative leads: Chloe Watfern and Priya Vaughan

In collaboration with: Vanessa Bartlett, Bec Blake, Katherine Boydell, Maria Cardoso Nunez, Ann Dadich, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Barbara Doran, James Dunk, Emma Elder, Kathleen Evesson, Sally Gillespie, Cecily Hardy, Shannon Harvey, Beth Hill, Georgie Igoe, Jess Lewis, Edgar Liu, Diane Macdonald, Aurora Murphy, Lea Richards, Paul Rhodes, Rena Shein, Cathy Smith, Jem Stone, Susan Thompson, Cam Turnbull, Bronwyn Vaughan, Michelle Walter, Karl Watfern, Kati Watson, Shaun Watson, Christie Wilson.

To read more visit:

https://www.library.unsw.edu.au/about-unsw-library/exhibitions-program/care-is-a-relationship

https://ethics.org.au/care-is-a-relationship/

In late 2022 and early 2023 Chloe Watfern, Priya Vaughan, Barbara Doran, and Marthy Stewart delivered four intergenerational, collaborative arts-based workshops to family groups - young people aged 7-12, and their parents/carers.

Focusing on creative engagement with nature and connection to place, we hoped to foster human and planetary wellbeing by inviting participants to map their bodies using found natural materials from the local area.

Participants trace their body on to a large sheet of paper or fabric and then decorate this outline during a reflective and creative guided process. By representing and exploring experiences situated at the site of an individual’s body, it is an ideal method for the investigation of embodied phenomena.

To our knowledge this is the first research project to use body mapping to engage with eco-emotions.

Attention please. Please pay attention.

This book is about art and how art is made and some of the people who make it.

It uses a lot of words to show how we can respect different brains and connect through art by paying attention with our whole bodies: our eyes, our ears, our mouths, our hearts, our hands, even our toes…

And so begins my forthcoming book with Routledge, adapted from my PhD thesis, about two studios on either side of the world that support neurodivergent artists—Studio A in Sydney, Australia, and Project Art Works in Hastings, UK. The book draws from over three years of fieldwork, including over one hundred interviews, and hundreds of hours spent looking, listening, and making alongside artists in the studio.

In 2021, as COVID flared up around us, a small group of carers, researchers and artists gathered online to share stories of caring for a loved one with dementia and to devise textile artworks that would somehow do their stories justice.

Stitch it for Dementia is inspired by craftivism - a ‘gentle’ form of protest designed to bring about positive change in the world. The term was coined by sociologist Betsy Greer in 2001 and taken up by the Craftivist Collective. As they say, “If we want our world to be more beautiful, kind and just, then our activism should be beautiful, kind and just”.

Our carer craftivists express the difficulties they faced, or are facing:, from stigma and isolation to a lack of support or insight from health professionals, the care sector, and society at large – all issues calling for recognition and change. And yet they also hold onto joy.
Their craft embraces the complexity of their experience—navigating relationships and roles, trying to hold all the threads together—sometimes creatively with lots of colours, sometimes tangled, knotted, frustrating and despairing, often exhausting, always a work in progress.

The Stitch it for Dementia project is led by Chloe Watfern, facilitated by Michele Elliot, and supported by grants from the UTS Centre for Carer’s Research and the Black Dog Institute. They dedicate this project to Dr Gaynor Macdonald, whom they remember with awe and gratitude for her commitment to dementia care and advocacy.

It has been exhibited in multiple settings, including during Seniors Festival and Vivid Ideas in 2022, and at UNSW Library Gallery as part of the exhibition “Care is a Relationship”, 4 September 17 November 2023.

Find more here images and info here: https://www.sphereintheknow.com/craftingcare

This poster has been taken to protests, displayed in windows, and exhibited at “Do Something!” at UNSW Library Gallery in 2022.

This workshop project was co-designed by Zoe Edema (Muralisto) and Chloe and delivered through the lens of environmentalism and craftivism.

It intended to develop literacy in sustainability and climate change through mindfulness, gratitude and letter writing – but not just any kind of letter writing.

Facilitators guide participants in the creation of beautifully crafted letters that acknowledge and give thanks to people who are taking action on climate change.

They explore collage and creative writing as part of the letter making process. The workshop is intended to bring a fresh and positive perspective to the issue of climate change, through a collective action that is kind, beautiful and personal, that highlights the immense power of our creative voice.

Photos here are from a workshop held at Randwick Girls High School in March 2022 with 22 girls from Year 7 to Year 12 in the lead up to International Women’s Day. Letters of thanks were sent to female leaders taking action on climate.

Techloony is a collaboration between artist Tony Coleing and Chloe.

As Techloony, Tony and Chloe swap layered image files to explore the strange, the supernatural, the ugly, the beautiful, the tyrant, the prophet, the digital, the ephemeral, the spaces between one and zero. They scour the internet for political propaganda, clip-art and royalty-free stock images. They take photographs from peep holes in the fabric of existence. They draw with pixels. They excavate bizarre worlds of the subconscious that appear, only for a moment, in that flicker before an email finally shoots off into the cloud.

In an exhibition in 2016 at Utopia Art Sydney, they exhibited a series of large scale canvas prints which somehow retained the blue-green glow of a screen reflected off the skin of an insomniac in the early hours of the morning. Materialising the digital in this way was effective, but there is still plenty of potential to take things further.

Each image has to be cut to the point that it no longer resembles itself. A leg is not even skin if all goes well, just a flesh-coloured shape against whatever backdrop happens to define it.

There they all are: scraps floating untethered on a white sheet of paper on my scratched-up dining table, right near a rattle that looks like a deer and a smear from yesterday’s dahl.

There they all are: parts of a bright yellow skirt, the open mouth of a satellite, fields seen from above, and a segment, headless, from some ancient Egyptian ornament that surely once had religious significance but is now just the gold and the blue and a few pieces of red stone.

How on earth can I possibly get it together? How on earth can I possibly make things stick when they have no business with each other?

Two collective collage workshops:

1. During the Big Anxiety Festival in 2022, in an exhibition of CLIMARTE’S TREE project: https://climarte.org/project/tree/
   
   This workshop served as an opportunity to gather; psychologists, artists, activists and the trees of Melbourne, to tell of our symbiotic narratives and to make art together as a way of healing and connecting as we face the climate reality.
   
   Inspired by CLIMARTE’s TREE Project, which is based on the City of Melbourne’s Urban Forest program, this workshop explored our lives with trees as we face a dangerously warming world. It responded to artworks in CLIMARTE’s TREE exhibition, as well as offerings from the general public to Melbourne’s treasured trees.

2. During the Sydney Environment Institute’s Nature Feelz Symposium in 2022 at Sydney University

   Decentring the human through making and dialogue.
   

Four year old Louis came up with a slogan.

Hot people make cool planets.

His grandmother Poss (Kati Watson) hand-stitched the first T-Shirt design.

A core team helped create our call to action, including Darcie Carruthers, and Chloe and Karl Watfern.

Artists, creatives, activists and makers submitted their designs to generate discussion and provoke thinking about environmental change.

All profits from sales donated to The Climate Council.

To our children’s children’s children…

These postcards were my Oma’s.

Now my children have drawn on them, and I have stuck parts of other pictures down.

Postcards say: I have been here, I will be there.

They say: I saw this, now you will see it too.

What do we want our children's children's children to see, to know?

Tell me on the cards.

“…a movement in cognitive science that hopes to explain intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks… simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units (the analogues of neurons)… joined together in a pattern of connections.”

Artist Statement

I have been accumulating scraps and fragments for years now – cuttings from books and magazines and trade journals that at one time or other caught my eye; piling up in cupboards; spilling out of bookshelves. More and more, I’ve been feeling more than a little bit oppressed by them.

At the very least, I’m losing sight of the connections. My archiving system is incoherent, dictated by obscure themes that were once a reason to thrust an elbow, a mollusc and some agitated drapery into a clear plastic sleeve. So, I am imploring you – help me do the sorting.

Of course, it could be more complicated than that. Are these cuttings an extension of me? Am I a folded, fragmented, clipping of myself?

Perhaps, with your help, we can begin to make sense of the pieces that make up a life, or a mind. And whose mind is it anyway?

—

This participatory collage was exhibited as part of the Manic exhibition held at Art & Design, UNSW during the Big Anxiety Festival in 2019.

During the first few weeks of Sydney’s 2021 lock-down, friends, family, and fellow artists received an envelope decorated by my son Lou, and filled with three cuttings plus a sheet with written instructions.

The instructions

Here are three things.

Please make something new with them and add a bit of you.

Then, take a photo of what you make and send it do me, along with the answer to these three questions:

1. What is one thing you can see/hear/smell/taste/feel right now. Describe it.

2. What is one thing you never want to lose? Why?

3. What is one thing you wish you could remember?

Now, find three more things and send them to someone else, along with this message…

A collection of responses

Icy fingers, a cup of steaming black tea,

stale vegemite and cardboard,

deep steady gaze of a lovely old labrador

who might not be alive in a week.

I never want to lose.

I never want to lose:

A sense of humour,

my energy, joy – I know

how much its absence hurts

the way greasy pans smell

when they haven't been washed properly,

but then there’s rain on the roof

of our house. Please stay little rain squalls.

I wish I could remember.

I wish I could remember:

The first words to my love,

where I put my wool,

all the countries in Africa off by heart in alphabetical order.

And morning breath on a hot summer afternoon,

salty, chalky in my mouth; stuck, clagged

into my craggy old teeth. A kookaburra laughs.

Magpie song and the wind in the trees. Last night’s fire.

I never want to lose.

I never want to lose:

the capacity to feel love,

the people that I love,

my marbles.

The humming motor of our fridge,

like an electric mosquito zapper,

like sunlight reflected off ripples, like

freshly picked grass.

I wish I could remember.

I wish I could remember:

My mother’s love, and

this strange state of blissful awareness

this ability to go deep within myself.

Fresh cold on my legs,

cool air on my skin. I’ve thrown

all the windows and doors open:

Wind in the trees, the easterly breeze.

I never want to lose.

I never want to lose:

Him

My mummy

The lock of my son's hair:

It is how I touch him.

A mountain on my knees, the sea,

the rhythm of the crashing waves are soothing.

A helicopter arrives and thankfully, leaves.

Charred eucalyptus, hovering.

I wish I could remember

I wish I could remember

The first five years of my life

Hugging our mother after a sleepless light

Seeing the moon landing

The eggshell of a new day,

it feels like sunshine,

it feels like home

gently cracking open.

It feels like home, like mum.

It tastes like sunflower seeds and morning dew

I never want to lose

I never want to lose

My limbs to draw, my nose

to snuffle at the soft part between ear and neck

of my sweet small people.

I hear the piano. I hear traffic

mixed with the wind and some dogs

from the park across the road

barking. I can see postcards.

I wish I could remember.

I wish I could remember:

Moments more clearly,

stories shared by grandparents,

dreams, every single morning.

I wish I could remember

I wish I could remember

What I was trying to remember

I can’t remember

I can’t remember

Take nothing from the world except sunlight (2017)

Drape the upper flanks of mountains (2017)

Found poems and collage on folded paper. A mini installation of paper planes.

Finalist in the 2017 Libris Awards: The Australian Artists' Book Prize at Artspace Mackay.

My mum makes pots. She is fairly self-effacing about it. She doesn't call them ceramics very often. She doesn't call herself an artist, even though I think she is one. She says she's a hedonist and that she makes things because it feels good - the clay feeling smooth under her hands, like silk, or skin.

These collages were exhibited at Utopia Art Sydney alongside my mum’s pots in 2016.

My brother-in-law Lloyd and I did these collaborations back in 2016. We printed them for Christmas cards that year, and I still fish them out of my card collection every now and then as a gift.

Dad has always written poems about Squid. I selected some, created illustrations, and designed this book: Squid.

Terra Firma Magazine helped us share some via their stand at the Volume: Another Art Book Fair at Artspace in 2017.

Digital prints of collages on folded paper.

Exhibited at “Small Publishers” show at the Brenda May Gallery in 2015.

My first ever collages.

An exercise in circles.

I was commissioned to make a music video for the Colour Cage single Will I.

All archival, creative commons footage.

Micro zines. Each page a single poem written by my dad and designed by me.