Exhibitions

Anatomy Lessons is a major touring exhibition by New Zealand based, Australian artist Michele Beevors. The exhibition is the accumulation of 17 years of intricate, immaculate knitting work, through which Beevors explores climatic distress, animal rights, the labour of care, and knitting as a trauma response. Her practice traces the grander ecological effects of extractive industries while holding space for grief, responsibility and the fragile entanglement between humans, animals and the environments we share.

Across the gallery, 17 soft sculpture, animal-like fossils, entice a sense of curiosity, eeriness, wit and deep reflection. They prompt us to consider how humans live with—and live off—animals, and what it means to be an animal in the Anthropocene, (the era in which human activity shapes the natural world more than any other force). For this Latrobe Regional Gallery activation, Anatomy Lessons becomes a eulogy for the species Beevors has chosen to honour, drawing attention to their endangered status and offering a museological commentary on display, care and the ethics of presenting the remains of creatures passed.

Beevors describes Anatomy Lessons as a complex weaving of climate change and art history; the history of scientific discovery and the labour of care; and the gendered histories of craft embedded in the representation of skeletal remains. Her knitted forms blur the lines between sculpture and craft, between traditional observation and the confronting question of our time: What will the future look like for humans without animals? The work unfolds as a silent lament, knitted species by species, form by form. Each convoluted stitch echoes the complexity of ecological crisis and our complicity within it—from the farming and dyeing of wool to the race to save wildlife teetering on the brink of oblivion.

Every creature in the exhibition is handknitted. For Beevors, knitting becomes a meditation on the dead—a way of working through grief and coping with ecoanxiety. The higher the anxiety, the faster the knitting. Even wool, seemingly harmless as a byproduct, carries its own fraught material history: factories closing and moving offshore, mulesing and docking practices, and the environmental impacts of dyeing. Through this material, Anatomy Lessons reminds us of the interdependence of everything, and our place in a catastrophic future of our own making—lessons we have been slow to learn as a species.

Throughout this rendition, dramatic lighting, sound and expanded drawing heighten the staging of these monumental remnants. The installation seeks to dramatize the significance of climatic care for biodiversity while acknowledging the resilience, adaptation and tolerance of the natural world as it responds to a humandominant planet. As philosopher Roman Krznaric writes in The Good Ancestor, we need an elastic empathy that extends not only to those living beside us, but to those yet to be born—those who will inherit the world we leave behind.

Anatomy Lessons asks us to observe 10,000 years of environmental change compressed into 50. Our infrastructures of industry, consumption and technology centred evolution are forcing rapid transformations in flora and fauna. Some species succumb to extinction; others adapt, altering behaviours, bodies and, in some cases, evolving into entirely new forms. David Farrier, in In Search of Future Fossils, questions whether humans can similarly change—whether we can adapt our behaviours, bodies and goals beyond the industries that shape our rituals and lifestyles, and whether we can learn from the natural genius of animals and plants that reinvent themselves to survive.

As new environments form before us, as familiar species disappear and others evolve, we are asked to consider what kind of ancestors we wish to become. In a time when the future is already unfolding, Anatomy Lessons urges us to act—to ensure the possibility of harmonious living for the animals, plants, humans and ecosystems that will define the new natural world.

Image: Michele Beevors, The Dead Heart, 2017, Red kangaroo (Macropus rufus). Wool on steel substructure.