Air

Shared As a species, our ingenuity enabled us to transform coal and oil — once ancient forest — into energy to fuel the Industrial Revolution and our contemporary world. For a time, the cascade of repercussions caught us by surprise. Now, however, we must join the dots, reinvent and take action. As the warming of our atmosphere accelerates, we find ourselves on the edge of another great transformation. Will we be passengers and simply seek higher ground, or learn to drive change creatively and shape a better future? Katie Paterson asks us to breathe deeply and use our sense of smell to stretch our imagination. She too takes us on a journey through time. In her work To Burn, Forest, Fire 2021 two small sticks of incense span the aeons. One, coloured a mossy green, is marked ‘first forest’ and the other, a deeper green, ‘last forest’. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the artist brought together scientists from around the world. Following their conversations and research, Paterson engaged a traditional Japanese incense-making studio, creating a meditative ceremony, which she invites us to share. When the first stick of incense is lit, it releases the complex mossy aroma of the forests of the Devonian period, 419 million years ago. We smell fern, fungi, clay, moss and lycopsids: the first plants to move energy via a vascular system. These plants proliferated and were so successful that the landscape they left behind in the Carboniferous period helped form the coal and oil our societies must now transition away from. Paterson takes us back to a time before animals or insects existed and then, from first to last, reaches beyond the present, offering the scent of one of our most biodiverse forests as a ‘precious last ark’ for the life that has evolved over the past 800 million years. She implicitly asks: What might take us to such an end? And what might be done to steer us towards a different fate? These two sticks of incense will be burnt just outside the gallery under the branches of the Bodhi Tree Project 2006 by artist Lee Mingwei, working with the monks of the Raja Maha temple in Sri Lanka. The monks continue to care for one of the rare descendants of the original Bodhi tree under which the young man we now know as Buddha achieved enlightenment. The Bodhi tree is thought to be the oldest living tree deliberately planted and continuously cared for by people, with a known planting date of 249 BCE. Lee’s Brisbane project is, in turn, a descendant of this tree. Katie Paterson / To Burn, Forest, Fire (detail) 2021 Rosslynd Piggott / Night and mirrors (detail) 1999–2000 27 26 Do we all breathe the same air? Do we all breathe the same air?