Grayson Cooke "But you O man, what long life have you? Not a hundred years may you delight in all the rotten baubles of this earth."

Born in New Zealand and based in Australia, Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, Associate Professor of Media and Chair of Creative Arts at Southern Cross University.

This work was part of a solo exhibition, "Songs of a Changeling Earth", held at the CSIRO Discovery Gallery in Canberra in 2019. The exhibition arose from a residency the artist conducted at Geoscience Australia in 2018. The exhibition also takes inspiration from German romantic composer Gustav Mahler’s song-symphony “Das Lied von der Erde / Songs of the Earth.” Mahler composed this work in 1909, by which time he knew he was dying. “Songs of the Earth” is a meditation on human mortality in the face of the eternity of the Earth, incorporating a libretto based on translations of ancient Chinese poems. This work presents a rich and colourful “mashup” of German Romanticism with the materials and processes of geoscience, using a mineral sample from the National Mineral and Fossil Collection, with an excerpt from the libretto for Mahler’s “Songs of the Earth” embossed on the surface of the work.

Digital C-type print on acrylic with embossed text. 

72cm x 54cm