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Jamie North Born 1971 Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia Lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales Jamie North develops his living sculptural forms around dichotomies of nature and industry, growth and decay, progress and collapse. In his new work Portal 2022, two circular concrete columns stand tall, like sentinels at the threshold of an imaginary garden. Composed of cast concrete with aggregates of industrial remains, the columns open up to an emergent tree habitat, offering an unlikely home to a number of plant species indigenous to Brisbane. In their crevices and cavities, a nascent ecosystem of native plants — including a Ficus rubiginosa (rusty fig) and Platycerium bifurcatum (elkhorn fern) — appears, slowly and against the odds, to be taking hold. Over time, the natural and man-made elements of the sculptures become entwined as the plants seek out natural growth lines and explore their partially eroded, post-industrial surroundings. Against the monumentality and rigid geometries of the concrete columns, the gradual, encroaching growth of the indigenous plants performs a tentative re-greening. Creeping vines and lithophytes (plants that grow on rock) climb the towering structures, offering moments of lush growth cradled by the cracked and crumbling forms. It creates what North refers to as ‘a living sculptural system’, one which, when tended with water and light, evolves continuously and in unplanned ways over the duration of the exhibition. 1 The frequent presence of plant matter in North’s work is the result of a childhood affinity with the natural world, a relationship that the artist describes as ‘communicative’: ‘From an early age I have observed plants in an intense way, and my childhood memories are filled with very specific thoughts around them’. 2 In bringing organic and inorganic materials together in a rich, unpredictable dialogue, North has commented on how his ‘redemptive re-use of the waste generated by human activity sits alongside that most definitive of regeneration processes: the succession of nature’. 3 North also draws on a third element — the viewer — who he invites into a symbiotic relationship with the work. 1 Jamie North, artist proposal for Portal 2022, QAGOMA Curatorial files, p.2. 2 Jamie North, quoted in Serena Bentley, ‘Jamie North Rock Melt 2015’, National Gallery of Victoria , 18 March 2015, <ngv.vic. gov.au/essay/jamie-north-rock- melt-2015/>, viewed May 2022. 3 North, artist proposal, p.52. Jamie North / Flume with Ficus rubiginosa (detail) 2013 107 Shared