University Art Gallery

Coming to Ground

• Coming to Ground - Catalogue

Bette Mifsud - Artist Statement

This solo exhibition features the diorama and visualizations of a major environmental place-specific artwork entitled Coming to Ground within a body of related landscape artworks that led to its conception. The exhibition is designed as a chronological installation beginning at the left hand side entrance of the upper gallery level and concluding at the lower ground floor diorama.

The full-scale artwork is to be comprised of a native garden of local endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland vegetation, a tree grove and three architectural structures of stone, steel and glass oriented to the cardinal points, surrounded by interconnected circular paths and trees. The work’s proportions are determined by Golden Section geometry. Its ground plan is a mandala with a central yantra. Its ground plan is a mandala whose circular footprint has diameter of 26 metres.

Coming to Ground began its long incubation in my early life as a first generation Maltese-Australian while working family market gardens on traditional Dharug land in North Western Sydney between 1963-1981, followed by a 25-year visual art practice.  Aspects of it appeared in different artworks over time, and converged during two years’ intensive practice-led creative doctorate research at the University of Western Sydney.

It is informed by research in climate change, eco-feminism, eco-philosophy, eco-psychology, ancient cosmologies, sacred architecture, connective aesthetics and contemporary environmental art, local native botany, local indigenous heritage and non-indigenous history. The research focused on the psychological source of anthropogenic climate change and biosphere degradation, and funnelled into this artistic contribution to their remedy.

Ecopsychologists see the human psyche as an integral part of the living world. Its state is mirrored in the state of the ecosphere. Contemporary unsustainable urban landscapes largely reflect a dismembering industrialized consumer consciousness.  By contrast, many ancient traditional cultural ecologies are necessarily holistic and sustainable. Coming to Ground is intended as a reconstructive environmental artwork representing a return of universal holistic cosmological knowledge and unifying symbolism to the Western Sydney multicultural landscape.

The mandala, while widely recognised as an Indian cultural form, is a universal idea, known by many names and embodied in numerous spiritual philosophies. It functions as an integrative device by means of transformation of consciousness (or layers of meaning). From the chaotic outer to the harmonised inner sanctum of the mandala lies a journey toward greater integration and integrity. However, this journey requires crossing a bridge between poetry and pragmatism; philosophy and practice; heaven and earth, in a yin-yang style embrace. This entails "the understanding of the inseparability of knowledge and action"; of heart and mind. (Dellios, 1996: 1-20)

The specific reconstructive purposes of this artwork are to: acknowledge the history that formed Western Sydney’s multicultural geography; symbolically embody a gathering of local diverse cultures; encourage the development of a holistic ecological consciousness in the region; create a living metaphor of positive transformations over time; present connections between, and integration of, human and non-human creativity by way of the native garden; offer a welcoming landmark and a contemplative sanctuary that is integrated within its surroundings; return endangered native woodland vegetation to the Cumberland Plain.

The title, Coming to Ground, originated in Martin Thomas’s room note for the exhibition of my landscape mural, Fugitive Ground (2002):

In crafting a tableau from frozen photographic moments, from scenes that we can behold but never possess, the artist refers to an unresolved history of territorial seizure, expressing the disconnectedness of a migrant culture which has yet to come to ground.

This ‘migrant’ disconnection is revealed in a number of artworks, including my Homage to Caspar David Friedrich (2005), a digital montage of my Katoomba garden on a misty day and two trees from the painting The Avenue Middelharnis (1689) by Meyndert Hobbema. The two European trees were severed from their original culture and hover above the living native Australian landscape.

We culture the landscape and the landscape cultures us. A garden is more than a place to grow food or flowers. It is an ageless communion with land, soil, elements, seasons and cosmos. In the native garden we can cultivate a sustainable grounding communion with indigenous ecologies.

For more information, please see the Bette Mifsud website.

Bette Mifsud
May 2009