Megan Cope, the shell seeker
Words by NATALIE KING. Photographed by DEREK HENDERSON. Styling by EWAN BELL.
Long before the Sydney Opera House was built in the 1950s, the site was a meeting point for the Gadigal of the Eora nation. Over thousands of years, their ceremonial debris formed ancestral middens, which convicts destroyed. Megan Cope’s large-scale sculpture recognises the site’s history.
FOR THE PAST four months, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope has been ensconced in the Marrickville Addison Road Community Organisation in Sydney’s inner west with a dedicated team collectively preparing for her new commission, Whispers, at the Sydney Opera House. Workers are sifting through 85,000 oyster shells collected from an array of hospitality outlets, hotels and restaurants. Kinyingarra — ‘oyster’ in Jandai language — shells are amassed in a vast warehouse where they are cleansed and perforated in order to be woven into a mammoth armature that will be seamlessly sited on and under the Sydney Opera House’s monumental stairs. An undulating wave of shells, this is Cope’s most ambitious work yet, involving more than 3000 hours of labour in what she refers to as “shell therapy — loving, cleaning, holding oysters and marvelling”.
Cope is adept at working collaboratively and collectively with a philosophy of deep listening to nature with its cyclical rhythms. “All the work I do is an acknowledgement of Country in practice through sculpture, painting and a process of remembering,” she says. Since April, she has held Scrub Clubs to gather workers to assist her and also to galvanise a communal effort. Process and preparation are part of the artwork. Her shell tapestry is about the psycho-geography of place and recalls Cope’s previous painting series After the Flood (2014) of elliptical shapes in iridescent blue that focus on river systems, topography, cartography and the cultural legacy of colonialism.
Concerned with the fragility of place and sustainability, Cope’s earlier preoccupation with floods became prophetic when, in March 2022, she left her home in Lismore, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, due to the seismic avalanche and relocated to Brisbane. Soon after, she presented a prescient installation Untitled (Death Song) in the exhibition Reclaim the Earth at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Recalling the eerie cries of the yellow-eyed bush stone-curlew bird who wails to signal the death call of climate change, Cope’s installation comprised suspended drums, recycled industrial equipment and rocks hovering over a bed of shells. She declares: “Can you hear the warnings?” Part haunting environmental mise-en-scène and part sonic sculpture, the installation has been previously reconfigured for MONA FOMA in Hobart in 2022 and the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres.
From a working-class family, Cope was raised by her Aboriginal father, and the pair lived in a panel van as he searched for work as a labourer. “The bush was my living room,” she recalls. As a single parent in the ’80s, her father instilled resilience and an unbound connection to the world while teaching his daughter to get “on the tools”. He has ingrained in her the “courage and fearlessness to be a woman”. Independent, self-reliant and eloquent, Cope is feminist and feminine. Notably, oysters are hermaphrodites, curved vessels that hold the foundations of the oceans together; oyster reefs form a shelter for mangroves and are a vital ecosystem for sea creatures and a nursery for fish and molluscs.
Oysters are a “SIGN OF HOPE”, she says. “WE ARE OYSTER PEOPLE. My great uncles and aunties WERE AND STILL ARE OYSTER PEOPLE”
Cope has already been working with oysters as contoured and sculptural forms for eight years, and to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House, she is diligently staining the shells with linseed to enhance their natural patina. As part of this mammoth public art project, Cope met with Aboriginal aunties from La Perouse to seek feedback and learn traditional weaving techniques with shells, thereby following protocols as a guest on Gadigal land. She also consulted with engineers and riggers to assemble her epic sculpture on the underside of the Opera House stairs as well as a mound on top.
Loss and reclamation are central tenets of Cope’s practice: “My practice explores the relationship between environment, geography and identity,” she says.
Whispers, 2023, Solo Exhibition at the Sydney Opera House, NSW. Sep 27 – Nov 26, 2023 Sydney Opera House