Every generation secretly believes it will witness the end of the world. As children many of us were convinced we would live long enough to watch the sun die and we rehearsed our grief quietly for a catastrophe billions of years away. The past suggests human beings can mistake
uncertainty for apocalypse.
Maybe that childhood anxiety has changed in scale and vocabulary and is still around us in how we negotiate climate collapse, political instability, an unwanted and unasked for technological future, and familiar societies fragmenting into new strangenesses. Maybe the world is neither fine nor doomed but unstable and indifferent and beautiful and terrible in unequal measures.
Maybe if there is another response to this state of affairs it is optimism and something close to
radical hope, an insistence on continuing to make things and care for things and notice things and to expect miracles anyway.
Text by Paolo Acuna.
Meg Kelso (b.1992, Papua New Guinea) is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist working on Wurundjeri country. Her multi-disciplinary practice is grounded in a rhythmic, repetitive methodology of making. Through the collection, layering and erosion of materials and methods, Meg’s practice is treated like an open-ended inquiry. She takes an iterative approach, akin to asking a question again and again, yet instead of an answer it yields new perspectives and subtle differences each time.
Informed by research into ecological philosophy and radical hope, as well as the personal experience of growing up during a volcanic eruption (Rabaul, PNG, 1994), the work finds solace in the universality of impermanence. Meg’s work navigates above and below, past and present, while always returning to a reciprocal relationship with ecological forces as a grounding principle. This results in works that embrace chance and adopt an ephemeral aesthetic, selectively revealing holes and fragmentation.
