Quandamooka artist Megan Cope is busy loading 40 of her latest sculptural works into the back of a small motorboat.
If the rain holds off and an early mullet season doesn't force Cope's skippers to delay, at 7:30am tomorrow, at low tide, she'll be heading out to one of the oyster banks on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) with two fishermen, a world-leading aquaculture specialist, two fellow artists, and Djalo, her dog.
There she'll plant the next formation in her latest work, titled Kinyingarra Guwinyanba, which in Jandai and Gowar language means "place of oyster rocks".
The artist is building a living, breathing artwork — an oyster reef, created one oyster pole at a time.
Kinyingarra Guwinyanba is the culmination of more than six years of research and art-making by Cope, taking the kinyingarra (oyster), and the architectural form of the midden, as both the material and the conceptual source for her large-scale, museum-based installations.
"Middens are shell piles that are accumulations of our cultural feasting and our family gatherings. Before colonisation these forms were enormous, and 30- to 40,000 years in the making," Cope tells ABC Arts.
In the 1800s, colonists began harvesting the reefs and the middens, first for food and later for building materials.
"They were carted off to Noogoon [St Helena Island] where there was a big lime kiln and a penal prison where convict labour was used to produce cement and lime to build the foundations of the colony," says Cope.
At that time, the entire sea floor of Moreton Bay had been covered in oyster reefs for millennia.
The establishment of the Moreton Bay Oyster Company in 1876 accelerated the farming of oysters, and by the end of the 19th century, nearly 90 per cent of the oyster beds in Moreton Bay had been decimated by overharvesting.
For the last six years, Cope's way of commenting on this cultural and environmental devastation has been to bring natural and man-made materials together in a series of works that include the re-creation of sprawling middens made from hand-caste concrete oyster shells.
But mounting frustration about the lack of agency in these artworks to prompt real change, as well as the realities of her own labour and materials, brought Cope to a point where this way of working felt unsustainable.
"It was a process of doing it over and over and over — and then saying, 'No, I don't want to make those things anymore because I don't think they're actually useful," she says.
"And they're a contradiction: I'm buying cement from Bunnings to make this work to talk about extraction, and when I think about it, that's not the answer."
The answer, for Cope, has been to spend more time on Country, listening to the stories of generational oyster farmers, such as Quandamooka Elder Uncle Ricky Perry, and learning about the oyster banks and the impacts of colonisation and climate change. It was this engagement with Country that helped spark the idea for Kinyingarra Guwinyanba.
"I started to think a bit radically about [the idea of] land art. How can I use what I know, which is the arts, [and] how can I look at resources and projects and collaborative practice and bring that onto Country, working with family who are already oystering?" says Cope.
"How do we make things that can actually make space for Country and animals — and how does art have a role in that? Can art do that? Because after six years of research and repeated practice, sometimes presenting the facts doesn't lead to change."
While Cope recognises the role of the gallery in helping to transmit ideas into the imaginations of people, she thinks those spaces have their limitations.
"I think moving outside the institution, collaborating with Indigenous communities, collaborating with environmental groups, that's how [change] becomes possible," she says.
"Cultural objects are designed to assist us living, you know? A lot of cultural objects that exist in museums are the things we need, whether it's fishing equipment or objects to carry water. What good are they in a museum?
"We breathe life into objects or paintings but essentially they are dead objects. Culture is a living thing. That's what culture is. Culture is alive and Country is alive and I want to highlight that."
Scientific outcomes
For Cope, restoring the oyster reef is about re-energising cultural practice and rethinking ways of art-making. But it's also an opportunity to decentralise knowledge and find new models for collaboration.
It was through this desire for collaboration that Dr Nigel Preston came to be involved in Kinyingarra Guwinyanba. A former program director for aquaculture research at CSIRO and director general of the non-profit organisation WorldFish, Preston is now an honorary professor at the University of Queensland.
He also has a long, personal connection to Minjerribah, having worked with the university's marine station in Dunwich and now with local oyster farmers on the possibility of future hatcheries.
"It was really important to have an ally like Nigel on the team. Not just in case we ran into trouble, but because he's someone who has committed their whole life [to this conservation work]. It's a merging of two worlds," says Cope.
"A lot of scientists are bound by bureaucracy and a lot of projects don't get off the ground because of a lack of funding or whatever it is that gets in the way. And you've got all these brilliant people with all of this knowledge who can't apply it, or the way they can apply it is restricted. So I was really keen to challenge all of that and to see if art can take us there."
Preston didn't hesitate to get involved. For him, it was this integration of art, culture and science that was particularly exciting.
"It's highlighting the beauty of the natural environment to drive a powerful message, and the need to support the peoples who've been in this land for thousands of years," he says.
"It brings all that together in a really subtle way … And that's more powerful in itself than any single political or environmental or scientific message. That's what's so clever about this — it integrates all those things. It's the full package."
And while it may be a work of collaborative conceptual art on one level, the project has serious scientific credentials.
"We know now that oyster reef restoration is highly successful, but it does more than just re-establish oysters," says Preston.
"The reefs provide habitat for other organisms and with their wonderful filtering capacity they also clear the water, and with clearer water there's more light for seagrasses. So this whole ecosystem is stimulated."
Once the oysters have been harvested, the shells can also be put back to act as 'spat collectors' for the next generation of oysters.
"And that is the definition of regenerative aquaculture," says Preston, who also notes that aquaculture is the only completely drought-proof and flood-proof industry to produce high-quality food.
Preston points out that only 2-3 per cent of all water on the planet is freshwater, and more than half of this is frozen or Arctic waste, so the importance of supporting healthy and sustainable ocean ecosystems — and projects like Cope's — have never been more critical.
Art fomenting change
Out on the oyster bank, Cope and Preston are assessing the formations from a previous planting, following king tides and floods that carried higher than usual levels of pollution and sediment into the bay. There's a little damage and a lot of barnacles, but the oysters are still growing.
"The barnacles are no threat to the kinyingarra, which is excellent. There's [also] hermit crabs, whelks and periwinkle shellfish growing on them as well. All of those are really important food sources for the fish and birds," says Cope.
Elsewhere on the bank, artists Hayden Fowler and Lucie McIntosh are working with fishermen and Perry family members Dylan and Marley to unload oyster poles from the boat and ready them for planting.
Fowler and McIntosh have been working with Cope over the last few days in a production line of cleaning, drilling and threading the oyster shells onto cedar pine poles. They are two of a growing number of artists who have joined Cope for days at a time over the last several months to help build and plant the oyster poles.
New Zealand-born Fowler met Cope during a residency at Bundanon in 2015, while McIntosh met the artist through her partner.
Both were drawn to the project and to supporting Cope because they too see the cultural and environmental possibilities of this kind of collaboration. Like her, they are also asking questions about the role of art in fomenting change.
"I'm really interested in the role that art can play in organising community and destabilising old and ingrained systems of power," says McIntosh.
"Can artists organise situations that create productive outcomes that are outside just the economy? I think obviously the answer is yes, they can."
Fowler is also reconsidering how to proceed with his own art.
"I've been thinking a lot about how work can be directed towards restoration, towards creating something that's not just more product and production but actually something that's functioning and restorative and non-pollutive," he says.
The collaborative nature of the project also appealed to both artists.
"It's quite subversive. Forget about all these bureaucratic, political, competitive-driven systems. They're designed to strangle possibility. There's actually a huge amount of space, loopholes and possibility to work underneath or outside that. It's taking back the power and just doing it for ourselves," says Fowler.
A living reef
As the tide starts to come in, the whole team gets to work.
A generator-driven water pump helps drill the poles into the sand, which are arranged in circles or semicircles, with the threaded shells strung at waist height ("Not my waist, because I'm so short!" jokes Cope).
The entire planting takes less than half an hour — which is lucky as the tide is now coming in fast. A stingray happens to swim past.
"On the first three plantings we did it on an outgoing tide so we had that extra time," says Cope.
"But the issue with that is that the sand is then firmer and it's actually a lot harder to plant them. So you win some, you lose some.
"Once they're in the water, really we surrender and that's when the ultimate collaboration with nature occurs."
Twice a day the poles are submerged by the tides, which is critical for the kinyingarra's survival. The poles have been designed to withstand this regular submersion, but they weren't part of Cope's initial vision.
In the early stages of her research, Cope had wanted to plant rocks on the banks — rocks that had once been removed to decorate colonial garden beds.
"But it's against the law to put rocks on the sea floor, so that led me to think about what is legal and what's not. And it's not illegal to plant timber," she says.
The cedar pine Cope is using for the poles is endemic on Minjerribah, and has been harvested by Uncle Ricky Perry. The cedar oil prevents the wood from rotting in the saltwater — so the poles could last six or seven years or more.
"Whatever happens with the timber, these clusters of oysters will become a reef, a form that's living and can continue to build on itself. The timber is a temporary elevation so that they can establish themselves," says Cope.
This is Cope's fifth planting, having installed the first poles on the bank on Invasion Day, January 26, this year.
The date was determined by the tides, but the symbolism wasn't lost on Cope.
"It just felt like we had arrived, finally, at this idea and this day, and we were about to embark on something quite significant," she says.
To date, 190 poles have been planted — a long way from Cope's initial vision of 1,000 oyster poles. But with 1.5 kilometres of oyster bank to work with, there is space and time for more.
"It may go on for the rest of my life, I'm not sure. The Country will tell us when there's enough," says Cope.
Until it does, Cope will continue to make her oyster poles and build the community around the project.
In September, she will take it to Korea, with an invitation to exhibit a version of Kinyingarra Guwinyanba at the Busan Biennale, after which she will take those poles out of the gallery and plant them nearby in collaboration with local artists and fishermen.
"Having that kind of cultural exchange in Korea is really exciting. It's wonderful to think about Quandamooka knowledge being exported to the rest of the world," she says.
"Maybe we can go to Britain and teach them how to look after their country. Go back and put these stakes in the Thames and see the oysters grow again over there. I think that this is the potential that our culture has."
