After the Floods

The last time I saw Megan Cope was pre-Covid, at the opening of the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, just as whispers of a pandemic were starting to circulate. For the Biennial, she’d made perhaps her most ambitious work to date, Untitled (Death Song), a sculptural installation constructed of materials related to the mining industry. The sculptures were instruments, with musicians playing a score based on the bird song of bush stone-curlew.

“The bush stone-curlew is very important to our people on materiality drawing on extractive mining, speaking directly to the environmental throes that the world feels like it’s currently going through.