As above, so below 2024 encapsulates Karla Dickens’s ongoing interrogation of the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and their effects on post-contact Aboriginal experiences and the natural world. The artist’s densely layered assemblages embody both a statement on our volatile and vulnerable world and an urgent call to action.

Dickens’s installation brings together three recent series of work. The ‘Disastrous’ series 2022 confronts the breadth of environmental devastation across Australia. Each of its collage-paintings explores a pressing issue affecting the Earth, such as rising temperatures, exploitation of resources, drought, extinction, floods and coral bleaching. Filled with arresting representations of death and destruction, these works highlight the failure of political powers to address persistent signs of ecological emergency. 

Hell or High Water 2022–23 invokes catastrophic forces of hellfire and flood, laden with symbols of alarm and environmental exploitation and distress. Each panel is punctuated by Dickens’s signature tongue-in-cheek text, steeped in puns, metaphor and black humour. Keeping it together 2022–23 – dual forests of globe poles bound together with raffia and twine – symbolises the tenuous feeling of trying to hold the world together as it falls apart.

The waagan (crow in Wiradjuri) acts a guardian and messenger throughout the installation, as Dickens explains:

I believe my ancestors are visiting if the crows appear. The crow gives me strength to fly above my shadows as I walk this life searching for connection and meaning.