Heat. Art and Climate Change

RMIT Gallery 2008

Tony Lloyd presents us with a much less fragile image of nature in his large-scale painting: We Have All the Time in the World (2008), or so it seems. this is a lush painting on a panoramic scale of a huge range of snow capped mountains. It is the kind of landscape that was once regarded as sublime: the grandeur and vast horizons of the wilderness. Yet it is a vista of wilderness into which an aircraft flies and leaves a subtle, yet unmistakable jet stream across an otherwise perfect blue sky. All appears to endure as it once did, yet even something as massive as a glacier, or as reliable as winter snow on the mountains, may yet be destroyed by that one thin white line behind the aircraft. Thus the irony of Lloyd's title is reinscribed by that disruption of conventional temporal values that underpins many of the works in this exhibition.

© Linda Williams. Heat. Art and Climate Change Exhibition catalogue.