By Jossie Warnant

Tied to Tide (1999). Image Credit: Ian Hobbs

A barometer for Sydney Harbour’s local winds, Tied to Tide — Jennifer and Michaelie Crawford’s 1999 artwork — endlessly interacts with the forces of the urban natural environment. Maritime-red ladders playfully sway, making 360 degree turns with large gusts of wind. The symphonic work creates a medley of sounds that respond to the natural surrounds.

It’s this connection with site that is central to the work of public artist Jennifer Turpin who works to capture the energy of the environment where her art is situated.

“It might be the energy of the harbour...or the wind, or the built environment. Ultimately we're wanting to help connect people to their environment.”

Turpin calls her artworks “collaborations with nature” that interact with lived environments to activate mundane urban natural spaces. In her collaboration she seeks to imbue a sense of environmental empathy in the viewer, helping them connect with their surroundings in a joyful manner.

“Something we talk about a lot is creating empathy because it's not only the kindest, but it's the most effective way in my view of engaging people's hearts and minds freely.”

This work has taken Turpin across New South Wales, to engage community members to ponder ways that natural landscapes can be restored to their former beauty following extensive human intervention and destruction. One of her earliest works, Memory Line (1996), took her to Fairfield in south-western Sydney where she planted a 2.7 kilometre long band of ryecorn grass marking the Clear Paddock Creek.

“The project was quite radical because it was the first time such a project was really happening in Sydney and probably Australia to try and address stormwater pollution by re-imagining the concrete stormwater drains that we see all over the suburban cities”.

This project was developed as part of the Restoring Waters initiative in collaboration with the Australian Conservation Foundation and Fairfield City Council to restore the memory of the creek of the past and encourage community members to contemplate the environmental future.

“The whole idea of the restoration project is based on the premise that you can't celebrate, something new, if you don't know what was lost in the first place.”

Environmental restoration has become a salient theme throughout Turpin’s work, with her 2016 Sculptures By the Sea installation, Operation Crayweed: Art-Work-Site, uniting the forces of art and science to mark the replantation of crayweed between Marks Park and the South Bondi Headland.

Operation Crayweed: Art-Work-Site (2016). Image Credit: Ian Hobbs.

The reforestation project was conducted by the University of NSW and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science and has seen the restoration of crayweed, a species of seaweed that vanished from Sydney’s coastline in the 1980s.

Turpin and Cromwell’s 500 metre bright site-specific art installation helps passers by learn about the work occurring below the surface, with three 'viewscopes’ on the headland that focus on the underwater areas where positive environmental rehabilitation is occurring.

“We as artists feel the importance of trying to create hope because I think artwork that is actively involved with communities is very much about creating hope. And it has the power to do that because it's about engaging the imagination.”

And herein lies the power of Turpin and Cromwell’s work, in taking often abstract and scientific problems and making the solutions tangible and accessible through education and environmental activation on a local community level.

“I really want to be working on solutions, not on problems,” says Turpin.

She says that there are many artists who focus on the environmental problems our world faces, but that it is just as important to deal with how we are working to fix the problems in our natural world.This, she says is key to the softer activist mechanism that art provides.

“In a quiet sort of way, I suppose a lot of the work is very much about activism because it's out there, engaging with community and environmental issues, trying to raise awareness and trying to help solve problems.”

Turpin and Cromwell’s work has a strong educational approach, with many of their projects engaging local primary and high school students to create their own environmental artworks. As part of Operation Crayweed, Turpin Cromwell studio collaborated with the children at Balgowlah North Public School to create a short animated film about the Crayweed restoration project.

“I think if he can get that kind of experience as a youngster, it can open your mind to all manner of opportunities.”

Turpin and Cromwell’s work is a reminder of what it means to be connected to the world around us. Their work, Halo (2010), situated in Sydney’s Central Park, moves and twist with the wind to “engage with the natural environment through kinetic moving in response to nature’s energies.” The work’s circular vat structures reference the history of the area as the original Irving St Brewery through the visual language and processes of repetitive stirring motions.

“It's a kind of element of activism in just the quiet way of reminding us about the fact that we are part of a much bigger world that has all this amazing stuff going on that we either don't know about, don't notice or take for granted.”

Turpin and Cromwell’s work and its endless interaction with the natural sphere, represent a subversion of traditional activist intentions. Opting to take a solution-based educational approach, her work develops empathy and connects people to spaces that are often thought of as lifeless. This gentler medium activates those who may have ceased to care about their natural world.

Pulp Interviews: Jennifer Turpin, Public Artist