Cover Image: Pool of Content installation by Charlie Lawler and Wona Bae at Old Customs House, featuring pink salt lakes forming in shallow trays.

One of the most spectacularly beautiful pieces in this year’s Fremantle Biennale is Pool of Content, a reproduction of the pink-hued salt lakes found in Western Australia (near Esperance and Hutt Lagoon near Kalbarri) inside of Old Customs House in Fremantle.

With light pouring through the skylight of the Federation-era building located a stone’s throw from the Port Authority, Pool of Content consists of a series of trays filled with water and salt in the process of crystalising, with a little artistic magic to evoke the pink lakes that tourists travel thousands of kilometres to gaze at in awe.

Ironically, this replica of nature’s wonder brought to us by Melbourne-based artists Charlie Lawler and Wona Bae is counterbalanced by awful reality that so many salt lakes are a result of humankind’s impact on the environment.

On the other hand the pink of the lakes indicates the presence of salt-loving algae and bacteria, which means that amidst the salt that is so destructive to the environment life in its most fundamental form blossoms, presenting Lawler and Bae with a beautiful metaphor for our current precarious predicament.

“The theme of this year’s Biennale is sanctuary, which doesn’t necessarily mean sanctuary for humans. We looked at these hyper-saline environments and found they are actually sanctuaries for micro-organisms,” Lawler tells me just before the opening of the 2025 Fremantle Biennale.

“Humans are having such an extreme impact on the environment that the Earth could become uninhabitable. But that does not mean life on Earth will come to an end.  Some species will survive and thrive in environments in spite of the damage we do,” says Lawler.

Growing out of the mini salt lakes that Lawler and Bae have created in Old Customs House are a range of mythical creatures, which are a more dramatic form of life blooming in the hyper-saline environment.

“We imagined these growths as salt creatures of the past that crystalise in the future to form something like a stromatolite. Again, they represent creatures who survive and thrive in environments that are toxic for humans but offer them sanctuary,” explains Lawler.

Such formations are timely reminders of the vastness of time between the first flickerings of life on our planet and our present moment. Quite simply, we are a blip.

“Stomatalites ruled the Earth for 300 million years. That puts things into perspective. It means that our existence on Earth is just a few ticks of the clock, a flash in the pan,” says Lawler.

“Ours is a reflection on what the world has been and what it can be and how we’re acting in it now, the human/nature relationship. We have stopped having so much of a relationship with the natural world which we’re a part of.”

The relationship of humans to the natural world is the central concern of Melbourne-born Lawler and Korean-born Bae, who met in Germany two decades ago when Lawler was working with the UN visualising data and Bae was studying.

They have forged a combined practice creating installations and sculptures (often site-specific) in which they explore the visceral and symbiotic connections between people and nature, leaning heavily on data collection and science.

In a recent work, Late, the duo mapped the data that flowed from the Gosper’s Mountain mega-fire that raged for 79 days at then end of  2019 and beginning of 2020 and created a seed-like structure to celebrate the natural survival systems that have adapted over the millennia and provide hope amidst the climate-change emergency.

“Artists have the privilege of showing these kinds of topics in a different context. We have access to galleries and galleries are the kinds of spaces in which people have the time to reflect. And as artists we are visualising data differently and thinking about it in a different way,” explains Lawler.

In researching Old Customs House and Fremantle for the Biennale, which invites artists to respond to the place in which the work will sit, Lawler and Bae discovered that much of the port city is built on reclaimed land.

“We also learned that one of the earliest commodities that was sent back to England from Western Australia was salt. It is one of the easiest commodities to extract using questionable labor practices. We found many connections within the narrative.”

While Bae is reluctant to support my reading of Pool of Content as coming out of an Asian sensibility — the flat pools evoke the carefully raked Japanese gardens, I suggest — she admits she does come from a culture with a different relationship to nature than ours.

“We believe that nature will protect us,” explains Bae. “We believe a giant tree is a guardian for a village. Or a mountain. They are the spirits who will look over us.”

Experience Pool of Content at Old Customs House before November 30, entry is free.

For more information, visit: https://fremantlebiennale.com.au/event/pool-of-content/