A luminous hue engulfs the room, serene, dreamlike, otherworldly. Fremantle’s Old Customs House is transformed in a surreal intervention by artist duo Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler. Deceptively inviting, Pool of Content presents a speculative landscape: a mirrored body of water spills through the heart of this colonial structure, a gesture that echoes the terraforming of Fremantle Harbour, revealing the enduring tension between colonial histories and ecology.
Drawing from the vastness of geological time inscribed across Western Australia’s landscape, the work contrasts the slow formation of ancient ecologies with the accelerating pace of human disruption. Pink lakes, with their vivid hues and haunting stillness, become both subject and lens. Formed over millennia, these hyper-saline environments shelter halophilic microorganisms: salt-loving life that flourishes where most cannot. At once alien and resilient, they offer a glimpse into potential post-human futures, where life persists beyond the limits of human habitability.
In an era of ecological crisis, Pool of Content repositions these altered environments within a contemporary frame, asking not only what is extracted from the Earth, but how nature itself is consumed as spectacle, commodified and circulated within the attention economy.
Our present moment marks a tipping point, where social and political structures stand in conflict with ecological systems, extracting more than they sustain. Pool of Content offers a moment of quiet pause. Through this mirrored expanse, Bae and Lawler invite reflection on human impact, shifting ecologies and the slow, enduring rhythm of nature’s evolution.
This new commission for SANCTUARY 25 continues the artists’ ongoing inquiry into environmental memory, extractive histories and the ways we inhabit and unsettle the land beneath us.
