HOTA Grasses Garden

• Main Authors: Armstrong, Keith, Davis, Donna, Constance, Danielle, Davies, Merinda, Lickfold, Luke
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: HOTA (Home of the Arts), Surfers Paradise, Qld 2023
• Subjects: First Nations; native grasses; experimental area; ecology; environmental art; socially engaged art; The Gallery
• Online Access: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/243690/

The HOTA Grasses Garden was collaboration artists, scientists, and First Nations informants. The site-specific work was exhibited between Jan 2023 and September 2023 at HOTA (Home of the Arts) Gallery, on unceded Kombumerri Country, Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast, drawing attention to native grasses within a gallery context. The site at HOTA was located outside the Gallery main entrance in the HOTA Gallery sculpture garden, and included the native Australian grasses, Kangaroo Themeda triandra, Barbed Wire Cymbopogon refractus and Scented Top grass Capillipedium spicigerum. A public First Nations-led Yarning Circle event presented at Nerung Ballun/HOTA -, ‘Living Ecology’, built context for the work, with a strong focus on Care for Country - especially native grass and grasslands. In September 2022 the grasses were transplanted to a permanent outdoor site on the public amphitheatre green roof opposite the gallery, assuring the long-term continuance of the project. The project drew on Indigenous cultural, scientific, and artistic understandings to ask, how we might see and engage with Australian native grasses in new, equitable and ecological ways. Such notions of multispecies encounter with, and respect for plants are implicit within Australian Indigenous cultures and practices of ‘Caring for Country’ - and have proven to work because of the mutual responsibility and reciprocity alive in the broader cosmo-ecological frameworks of Indigenous traditional knowledge systems, which are fundamentally different to those of Western extractive colonialism. The sponsoring and planting of a small native grassland artwork/mound fostered a living site for this experimental art/ecology/education experiment whilst engaging a campaign built on partnership, respect, and care.