Marian Drew - Every Living Thing
Marian Drew has bodies buried in her backyard. Don't worry, it's for art, she explains to Nick Dent
Marian Drew is doing a mental inventory of the contents of her freezer. "There's a few birds and an echidna. Oh, and someone is bringing me a fairy penguin." The Brisbane-based artist is not describing abnormal dietary needs, but the raw subject matter of a photography series that is both ravishingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad.
Every Living Thing is one of three shows opening at the Australian Centre of Photography this week. Composed and lit in the style of Dutch and Flemish still life paintings of the 17th Century, Drew's photographs, which she has been working on since 2002, depict native Australian animals that have died unnatural deaths.
"I'd just come back from Germany," explains Drew, a senior lecturer at the Queensland College of Art. "And the whole day before I left I'd spent in a museum in Kassel [Schloss Wilhelmshöhe] that has an extensive collection of still life paintings. Having all those images in my head and flying home, getting in the car and seeing dead animals - a connection was made."
Due to rapid urban sprawl, Brisbane has a lot of roadkill. Without having to try, Drew found the mortal remains of possums, snakes, bandicoots, koalas and lorikeets, all not far from her home in Hemmant, near Moreton Bay. She even found a pelican that had been electrocuted by power lines. "Cats obviously kill the animals too," she says. "But I only use ones that are pretty fresh and intact."
The ghoulish pastime of generations of Aussie kids, collecting dead things is Drew's way of paying tribute to them. "The animals are dying for our own sense of progress," she says. "The idea in traditional still life is a representation of the wealth of the landowners - the idea that God put on earth all these animals for us to use. Those ideas seemed relevant in Brisbane where all of us have ignored [the deaths] for a long time."
To replicate the sombre interiors of baroque-era kitchen tables, Drew works in a darkened studio by torchlight, exposing film for 15 minutes per shot. Backdrops include landscapes she has photographed and printed onto large sheets. When shooting is complete, the animals get a decent burial in Drew's two-acre backyard.
Lying in state on crisp linen, the deceased creatures are rhymed with a piece of fruit or a curio. A prostrate bandicoot mirrors the shape of the wilting protea flower placed in tribute before it. A kookaburra who has laughed his last is curled up next to a kookaburra-shaped milk jug. Perhaps most poignant is a chunky ex-wombat lying next to a broken half watermelon.
Drew admits the response from viewers is not always positive. "Vegetarians are the most vocal," she says. "But usually if they look a bit longer they realise there's respect and ideas that are productive to think about."
Marian Drew's Every Living Thing is at the Australian Centre for Photography until 30 August, together with Darren Sylvester's Our Future Was Ours and James Brickwood's Schoolies