Each year in April scientists from Adrift Lab travel to Lord Howe Island where they have been researching the ongoing impacts of plastic pollution on the shearwater bird population. Rubbish is carried to Lord Howe Island by the shearwater birds who mistake the plastic for prey in the ocean. Ingestion of plastics by the birds leads to dehydration, starvation and exposure to toxic chemicals. Dr. Jennifer Lavers explains “As a scientist and a science communicator, I feel it is my responsibility to tell the story of these places and give a voice to the voiceless,” as each year, the proportion of shearwater birds recorded with plastic in their stomachs continues to rise. At Cockatoo Island, an arrangement of reclaimed wooden tables reference Adrift Lab’s kitchen table on Lord Howe Island and display a number of specimens, thousands of images, hours of video, and years of scientific research by the scientists.

Extinction Studies by Lucienne Rickard presented at the National Art School encompasses a durational drawing performance and its material traces. The work is a new iteration of a year-long project where Rickard undertakes a daily reckoning: drawing, then erasing a recently extinct species sourced from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, the authoritative list of extinct and threatened species used by scientists globally. For this new performance of the gesture, Rickard uses the same paper that was daily drawn upon and erased, and which bears the traces, memories and indentations of this accumulative engagement with loss. Extinction Studies merges art and science, a ‘study’ being both a technical art term for a drawing or sketch done in preparation, and more generally understood as the practice of devoting time and attention to understanding a topic, in this case the process of species extinction and urgent concerns for the future of biodiversity and life in the natural world.

“Each table references the kitchen table in Adrift Lab’s home base on Lord Howe Island: a site of conversation, intellectual discussion, driven by curiosity and detached inquiry, a place to debrief after each day in the field, to console, to laugh, and to prepare oneself for the following day’s reckoning with the arc of human indifference. Together, the tables display what has been gathered from these endless discussions and fieldwork. This exhibit is an invitation for each of us to shed complacency and to continue the conversation, in our everyday lives, at our own tables.”