CODES OF SURVIVAL: Accounts from the Auckland Islands
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In 1984 Lloyd Godman conceived the idea of take an expedition of artists to the remote Auckland Island 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, experience the wild environment, create a series of works that would tour New Zealand as a series of exhibitions. While these remote protected islands are most often the domain of scientists, Godman argued that artists are scientists, their research is on an aesthetic and conceptual level. Beset with many problems and political brick walls, the project took years to materialize but with perseverance in 1989, eleven artists visited the Islands in a ground-breaking and highly successful project titled Arts to the Subantarctic. (Including, Bill Hammond and Laurence Aberhart's). Works created by the 11 selected artists were curated into an exhibition that toured art galleries and museums throughout New Zealand for over 2 years. The project was also the first-time woman sailed on a New Zealand Naval vessel.
Codes of Survival is Godman’s personal response and contribution to the project, and his first series of work with Photograms. He incorporated sophisticated combination black and white photograph photograms to create unique photographic works. The project cumulated with an accompanying installation with a sound scape by Peter Adams and a series of short stories that related to events on the Subantarctic Islands.
It was a watershed event where Godman moved to camera-less photography with projects like Adze to Coda, Evidence from the Religion of Technology, Aporian Emulsions and acted as a catalyst for his interest in photosensitivity that led to his current living art works with plants.
About the author
Lloyd Godman established and was head of the photographic section of the Dunedin Art School, New Zealand, for 20 years and then taught at RMIT, Melbourne, for a further 9 years. From 1989, his work moved from camera-based images to camera-less photograms with projects like Codes of Survival, Adze to Coda. He began exploring light sensitivity and evolved to where he grew images into the leaves of Bromeliad plants. Then followed a series of interactive gallery installations with plants which evolved into his current work with Tillandsias and the built environment.
He is now seen as a leading ecological artist integrating Tillandsias into the built environment in a fully sustainable manner, with The AGE newspaper referring to him as an extreme gardener.
Artist Lloyd Godman is at the forefront of a modern trend to bring an appreciation of the natural world into our structural domains. Buildings do not rest ‘above’ or ‘outside’ a landscape, separated from the surrounding environment. On the contrary, structures interact with the natural world as objects that cast shadows, consume resources and provide rich habitats for life.
Godman’s living, plant-based artworks reinforce the necessary connectedness of buildings and the wider environment. Not only do these artworks convey powerful messages and philosophies of sustainable and ethical physical interaction, but they also reach out beyond ideas to become part of the actual structure – as physical objects, Godman’s artworks are purifiers of the air as well as the soul, suppliers of colour as well as calmness, and filters of water as well as the human spirit.
...... it is highly unusual for an artist to forge new aesthetic, philosophical and architectural directions through his work; Godman, however, has managed to use his diminutive plants to convey global concepts, and in the process participate in a new wave of appreciation for plants in the built environment.
John Power
