The Last Age of the Falling Grace – 2026 Multichannel Commission: CJ Taylor
'The Last Age of the Falling Grace' is a meditation on our relationship with the land in the midst of climate emergency – a form of activism that seeks to create sensation that moves the viewer to act. It is also Jayne’s story; a story of life on the land for the land.
21 August to 5 December 2026
It is about belonging, a shared notion of "place for the benefit of place," and by extension us all, and about collapsing time, experience and perception into a shared sensation of love for the land.
Talismanic flora appear in states of flux; a gum leaf suspended in a void gently glowing, surrounded by an ember of its own destruction; a Fire Orchid preserved as virtual life repeatedly transplanted in thin air.
In an experiential invocation of story and place, 'The Last Age of the Falling Grace' incorporates landscape under threat with critical flora realised as spatialised content across three synchronised screens. A slow evocation of story in the expanded cinema tradition, beautiful and gentle – with a fiery unforgiving heart at its core.
Feature Image: CJ Taylor, 'The Last Age of the Falling Grace' (2026)
Artist
CJ Taylor lives and works in bushland on Kaurna and Peramangk country in regional southern Australia where his relationship to the land intimately shapes his visual arts and activist practice.
His work pivots around his involvement in biodiversity care for the bushland and its native inhabitants and the questions that occupying that land raises regarding our experience of time, reality, narrative and history in threatened remnant native hinterlands.
Experiences during Australian Black Summer of 2019/2020 as a volunteer firefighter and the climate crisis are of primary importance to his current work.
He has created major projects in Australia, the USA and the Outer Hebrides and Shetland Islands of Scotland working with the Adelaide Civic Collection, South Australian Museum and National Museum of Australia.
He has worked on several projects (’12 Canoes’, ‘Still Our Country’) with the Yolngu community in Ramingining in SE Arnhem Land. His work won the inaugural Adelaide Park Lands Art Prize and the Whyalla Art Prize. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University.
This project is supported by ACE's Porter Street Fund.
