'Paleo-energy' by Atelier 21 & 'Jambreen, Australian rainforest erasure' by Roslyn Taplin

During the duration of COP26 in Glasgow we hosted two exhibitions in our gallery space which addressed issues within the current climate crisis and we were happy to bring such innovations, discussions, calls to action and awareness of plights across the world to SaltSpace gallery.

The joint opening was on the 3rd November and featured a performance by Joana Carvalhas.

The forests of Tamborine, or ‘Jambreen’ in the Aboriginal Yugambeh language, are tiny pockets left over from a former vast Eastern Australian rainforest that covered the Tamborine plateau, the Border Ranges, and from the Tweed to the Richmond, all making up the ‘Mt Warning Caldera-Big Scrub’.

Australian scientists have pronounced this Caldera-Big Scrub as a centre of highest richness of subtropical rainforest plant taxa. The area has a history of being stable rainforest habitat over at least 120,000 years.

Logging for Cedar known as ‘red gold’ and farming by white European settlers resulted in most of the rainforest's removal in a matter of decades from 1860s to the 1900s. Less than 1% of the Caldera-Big Scrub now remains.

This exhibition’s mixed media works on paper show the Jambreen forest, its thresholds, assemblages and individual species, inscribed with words from speeches presented at United Nations forums on rainforests.

Ros Taplin is an Australian climate change artist and an environmental academic in the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy at SOAS University of London. Ros works at Tamborine Mountain, Australia and Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Scotland.

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The adjoining show was Paris collective Atelier21’s presentation of Paleo-energy for the COP26 in Glasgow with Schneider Electric foundation, an exposition on the history of durable and sustainable energetic innovations.

Atelier21’s aim of the ‘Paleo-energetic timeline’ is to inspire people to take back these innovations as a solution for the ecological transition of tomorrow.