Smoke Signal, 2016.

Print on Silk

L 1000 H 1550mm

Smoke Signal charts global climate changes in 2016, the hottest year in recorded history since 1891 (the beginning of the data).

In Smoke Signal, images that access a shared visual history from the year’s global weather reports have been juxta-positioned against one another. The work creates an allegory, illustrating the impact of temperature rise across the spectrum of environments from the Australian bush to Antarctica’s polar regions. There is a sense that the tip of the iceberg is all that is currently visible as smoke plume billows out from the underbelly of the iceberg, showing the fall out of escalating weather changes.

Smoke signals are one of the oldest forms of long-distance visual communication used to signal danger and gather people to a common area. Smoke Signal highlights that there are dangerous and unknown consequences to the climate crisis that are visible in realms beyond the conceivability of our senses, signalling a mark of change into the Anthropogenic era.

More about the work -

‘Jasmine Morgan Ryan is similarly versed in environmental catastrophe, though her hybrid objects and imagery take their cue from the opposing polarities of cause and effect. Casting aside any tactical melodrama she diligently conjures works that, when fully appraised, quietly suck the air from our lungs. Morgan Ryan achieves more than a mirror to our sins. She implicates contemporary cosmological meltdown within the guise of an “art work”. It is here, by giving form to aesthetic impulses, that the self-described “techno-romanticist” extrapolates our worst fears for the environment through an effect not unlike being hit with a brick wrapped inside a pillow. We are drawn to her Smoke Signal, only to discover that the billowing clouds beneath the iceberg are not just for poetical effect; they were created by Australian bushfires in 2014—the hottest year in recorded history. That the iceberg which sits above like a glittering orb melted in that same year, so creating a powerful visual and conceptual cohesion, does little to relieve the uneasy tension within the work.’

by Simon Gregg, curator Gippsland art gallery, Sale VIC.

Garland Magazine - 16 June 2016, https://garlandmag.com/article/aesthetics-in-a-time-of-emergency/ Accessed Sat 12 Apr 2025.