The Limits of My Language Are the Limits of My World

The connection between words and what they signified had been broken. It seemed to me that I was lost; the first human power - the power to name - was failing, or had always been an illusion.[1] - John Berger

The word “emotion” enters the English vocabulary from multiple origins, partly deriving from the Latin emovere, “to move away, remove or agitate,” the French emouvoir, “to stir up,” and émotion, meaning a “physical disturbance.”  Like a miscellaneous stream of aches, joys, urges, and burdens, emotions are intermingled and complicated in every way. A strange hollowness arises in conversations about the climate crisis—a crisis of such unfathomable magnitude that it defies human-scaled perspectives, casting a staggering, irreducible uncertainty over the future. The English language falls short in its ability to address the conditions of an uncertain present and register the fear of an unimaginable future.

 If we accept Wittgenstein’s suggestion that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world,” then we need to find words beyond the current limit.[2] At present, the reach of the English language—the stock of words and phrases used to express and crystallise experience—is inadequate to capture the ontological threat of the ecological crisis. Yet it holds the potential for greater potency beyond the binders of a dictionary. Contrary to Wittgenstein’s claim, the more we know through today’s dominant language—framed and flattened by its economic exchangeability—the more ambiguous the present emergency becomes. As the dangers of climate breakdown have become widely accepted on a scientific level, the English language has facilitated a privileged, distanced sort of voyeurism, rendering its staggering threat ungraspable.

Like a fog, climate change is everywhere. Like a heatwave, it clings to us, dampening our armpits in response to rising heat. In spite of this, climate change’s ability to devastate our quotidian existence feels vague and unimaginable. We infer its abstract threat through data and graphs that quantify everything, dealing with percentages, figures, patterns, and estimated probabilities. Circulating social media images of wildfires, melting ice caps, forced displacement of migrants and species, and disappearing coastlines only represent small fragments of a whole. The challenge, from this position, is grappling not only with the threat but with the feeling of what’s to come and what will soon be.

The Limits of My Language are The Limits of My World emerges from the blindspot in the language of emotions, vast holes in a lexicon we don’t even know we’re missing. As a point of departure, the exhibition draws on the Australian eco-philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s concept of “psychoterratic states”—a compendium of words he invented that describe previously unnamed emotional and existential experiences brought on by the climate emergency. Albrecht coins and compiles words for these vivid, strange, and complex feelings that rouse from the loss of our environment globally, casting light on the idea that the apparent apathy and indifference, for some, may actually stem from feelings that aren’t discernible through existing language. Being able to name these emotional states amid the ongoing desolation and loss of solace is like finding a handhold in the dim light of confusion, rather than scrambling around in the dark. Feelings are fleeting, and finding words for them brings solidity, yet naming also acts as a form of fixing—freezing life and turning what once felt open and dynamic into something pinned down, like butterflies displayed in a case.

The works presented in The Limits of My Language are the Limits of My World respond to one or more of Albrecht’s terms —evoking the obscure emotions we might be feeling where difficulty in expression is experienced. At the same time, the artworks transcend this tentative exercise of translation, tuning into the instabilities, absences, and fissures within the current crisis, reminding us that our lives cannot be confined or reduced to mere platitudes.

Eutierra: a positive feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated. The way your heart lifts when you reach the end of the dirt road, and the silky horizon where the lake meets the sky comes into view, and you smell the water and the sun shimmers diamonds on the lake’s wrinkled, restless surface. [3]

Anchoring the viewer’s experience of the exhibition like an empyrean fountain is Steven Bellosguardo’s multi-tiered sculpture, Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire (2024). The stainless-steel sculpture winds upwards and pierces artificial vessels that wobble and diminish in size. The circular motion reflects Bellosguardo’s references to three circulating pump systems—a fire bath, a water fountain, and blood vessels. Here, Bellosguardo combines the forms of these organic and electrically manufactured resources to create a structure that is both tree-like and prosthetic. The hydraulic systems Bellosguardo draws on rely on stable conditions: sufficient fluid, a safe temperature range, and an enclosed system. In Bellosguardo’s artwork, these systems are placed under duress. They fatigue and begin to break down— leaking, overheating, or shutting down entirely.

The blue of the silicone vessels is a reference to high-risk signal on the fire danger index. Bellosguardo alludes to the threat of unforeseen rages and upheavals such as rising temperatures and burning landscapes. Instead of evoking fear, however, this threat is mellowed, seemingly pacified by the coolness of the blue.

Bellosguardo highlights the disconnection and dissociation from imminent disaster that transpires from capitalist technological-investment solutions to climate change. Yet this reassuring dominance over disaster is faltering, as we face an ever-growing series of socio-climatic events that remind us we can neither command nor imagine ourselves separate from the natural world. This jolting reminder—of how deeply enmeshed we are—evokes a creeping anxiety as we become more cognisant of the planet’s fragility. Paradoxically, it is in this same recognition, which Bellosguardo alludes to, that a harmonious feeling is shored up, offering a kind of vital relation with the Earth—like the soft, fugue-like state one experiences while staring into a fire.

Topopinia: a deep longing to enter a place you have never been to. [4]

Occupying the centre of the gallery is Stephanie Wilson’s installation, Take (me) away (2024). The assemblage of objects—consisting of lounge seats, a tray table, green carpet tiles, and a potted palm— transforms the space into a fictional airport lounge. Wilson’s installation echoes the bland, impersonal atmosphere of a typical airport departure lounge while appending to it a more colourful, kitsch veneer. On the tray table, a slice of Hawaiian pizza and a Blue Hawaii cocktail in takeaway containers create a tawdry, decorative scene reminiscent of a holiday snapshot or postcard. There is room to indulge in escapist reverie in Wilson’s work, offering the illusion of escape to idyllic sunsets, romantic seascapes, and sentimental landscapes. Yet the viewer remains in the stasis of a waiting room, suspended in anticipation, longing for a place that does not exist.

By deferring our hope for happiness to some future point, these moments of suspension produce a mixture of anticipation and agitation within the unfolding present—and conversely, a detachment from it. Wilson’s installation binds the viewer to a temporal void, mired in the slow, dull rhythms of waiting, counting down minute by minute for a new impression to succeed. The heightened anticipation of the event-to-come is dampened in waiting without relief or rupture. Instead, one’s anticipatory consciousness is ensnared in a perpetual "not yet," with the anxiety of knowing that imminent change is on the horizon—but what is the event-to-come? Within the drawn-out space of waiting in this airport lounge, we become complicit spectators to the looming imminence of future ruin.

Toponesia: the process of forgetfulness of precious places, which afflicts us as we leave the world of our childhood and enter adult life. [5]

Topowokia:  the process of remembering precious places as our memories are reminded by photographs, smells, objects and a myriad of things that return a loved place to the forefront of memory. [6] 

Presented in close proximity to Wilson’s airport lounge is Prisoner’s Cinema 2 (2024), a wall sculpture by Chloe Nolan. In this piece, Nolan bends and joins the flexible slats of two caravan awnings. The soft parting of stratocumulus clouds reveals the blue sky beneath. Nolan explains that the idea for the work emerged from the deadening weekday hours of computer gridlock at her corporate office job. The air-conditioned, self-enclosed office space and the monotony of repetitive, mundane tasks led her to daydream, recalling the leisurely days spent watching her father refit an old caravan in Perth.

There is a desire to escape what Albrecht recognises as one of the many "emotional extinction events" arising from the hardened and alienating lifestyle of our contemporary existence. [7]. As part of an ongoing separation process—characterised by increasing social disaffection and technological isolation—we lose felt contact with the outside world. Distracted by externalised whims—the notifications, replies, emails—we swipe at, scroll past, and click through; untethered by distraction, we become adrift like a kite string cut off. This sense of physical detachment, however, is a dangerous mirage, a luxury that only certain segments of society can afford.

The ecological crisis reminds us of the interdependence of all things and the inescapable reality of being bound to the human body and to this Earth. Nolan’s work emerges from a sense of urgency, seeking to reconnect with a feeling of being in the natural world before it is crushed into irrelevance. One such tactic was to unfix her mind from the knotted bowels of the corporate world, manifesting as a daydream drifting through sky-blue memories of the past. Here, once again, we encounter the fantasy of disconnection, but this time, directed towards a rediscovery of a more immediate, sensory life within the numbing existence imposed by world-destroying systems of capitalism.

Anticipated Solastalgia: the distress experienced in the present moment arising from anticipated negative changes to the environment.   A paradoxical situation of experiencing solace and simultaneously realising fragility and imminent loss. [8]

In a similar vein, Veronica Charmont’s photographs evoke a longing to hold onto the memory of that which is slowly slipping from sight. The six framed photo collections reflect the artist’s experience of “pre-loss,” a feeling of anticipated loss associated with senseless industrial development. [9] In three panels— I Am Remains of the Local Park , Dedicated to Recurring Dreams of Disaster, and  SINISTRA(2024)—Charmont poignantly documents the familiar surroundings of her hometown in Keilor, as though attempting to preserve life through her photos before the disruption expected to be caused by the Federal Government’s approval of Melbourne Airport’s third runway. They present a salvage paradigm, a desperate, bittersweet effort to stall the unstoppable, to hold onto the green foliage of the trees and quietness of the landscape, softly interceded by birdsong, before the noise and distress unfolds.

In the other three panels—The Warning of a Wing Wandering Through the Air, I am Flying in Anxious Circles, and I am Auspicious Croaks (all 2024)—Charmont freezes the flight of birds through her camera. Drawing from the religious practice of augury, Charmont searches for signs in their movements. For Charmont, observing and capturing the birds’ erratic patterns becomes a language in itself, embodying a subliminal sense of distress. Holding them in wonder and contemplation, their behaviour reveals an intuitive impression of something about to happen, an anxiety that the attentive observer cannot fully register or foresee. Here, the inadequacy of our senses becomes apparent, warped by the frenzy of accumulation, extraction, screen-based distraction, and production. In other words, our perception is riddled with gaps. As though to rectify this mental disconnect, Charmont engraves inscriptions into the wooden frames, using Etruscan characters similar to those often marked on objects to signify purpose or meaning. Through these engravings, the images “speak” with a fervour of feeling that anticipates dread, pain, melancholy, and anguish for what is to come and what will eventually have been.

Mermerosity: an anticipatory state of being worried about the possible passing of the familiar and its replacement by that which does not sit comfortably in one’s sense of place. [10]

Arthur Nyakuengama’s installation Indoors (2021) instils a funereal sense of quiet towards the rear of the gallery. Using domestic furniture—a chair, a single row of curtains, and a pair of latex gloves—Nyakuengama has coated these furnishings in dark, oiled leather. The chair is turned towards the gallery wall, facing away from the outside view where light, temperature, and the happenings of everyday life shift and remain observable; instead, it sits facing the heavy, closed drapes. Vision is blocked, yet there is an implicit demand to sit and look nonetheless, to look closely and wait for the curtains to be drawn open.

The word “crisis” comes from two Greek roots: krisis, meaning “turning point,” and krino, meaning “to judge or decide.” This can be traced further back to the Proto-Indo-European root krei, which means to sieve, sift, or separate. In Nyakuengama’s work, to be separate affords no insight, producing in the spectator not—as claimed—a sense of agency, but instead a profound sense of isolation. Removed from the thick of things and witnessing devastation as an aesthetic object from afar through our screens, we fail to grasp the momentousness of loss. Like the drawn curtains in Nyakuengama’s work, this position blocks our sensory abilities and separates us from confronting the extreme immediacy of the climate catastrophe. But to be separate from the fragility of the world is simply a reification, a specious, desperate attempt to stave off upheaval by tightly drawing the curtains on what is already established. Nonetheless, a sense of impending doom that most of “us” are yet to experience as grief drifts in from this recognition, rustling the curtains closed on this imminent catastrophe that screams at us.

Eco-paralysis: an apparent state of apathy as a result of eco-anxiety, which inhibits taking real actions, maintaining people in a state of limbo. It is not a lack of concern, on the contrary it reflects the dilemma of facing the enormous scale of the climatic and ecological challenges but being unable to do something meaningful to solve it, resulting in what appears as complacency and disengagement. [11]

Rohan Schwartz’s series of works slip into discrete corners and spreads across various areas of the gallery. Like a watercourse, these pieces move us through the infinite and the indefinite, the macroscopic and the microscopic. Beginning with In the Mire (behind the shadow there lies another shadow which dispels all light) (2024)—a photograph located in the gallery’s bathroom window and captured at Rome’s Trevi Fountain—the image depicts a cluster of plastic-wrapped, manufactured replica statues below the fountain's view. For Schwartz, these cheap imitations of culture and history, meant to lure tourists into consumption, sideline and detract from the monument’s beauty and complexity, ultimately negating any opportunity for awe and wonder. Drawn in by the decoy, we catch only a glimpse of what is truly there. One loses a sense of place in place. As we overlook the beauty and enchantment of the world in a fugue-like state—diffuse and distracted—we lose grip of the very backdrop that lends meaning to loss.

As a counterpoint to this loss of perspective, Schwartz presents a series of four photographs capturing microscopic representations of everyday vistas. The artist has altered the size and resolution of each image, rendering its details imperceptible and compelling the viewer to move closer. The web-like texture on the mounting boards enhances this effect, creating a hazy, foggy extension that obscures the precise nature of the scenes. Resonating with British author J.A. Baker’s observation that "the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,"[12] Schwartz’s photographs suggest the limitations of our faculties to register the impacts of climate change on micro and macro levels. In these blown-up images of dust particles and microbiomes, there is an affinity with the cosmos that connects the infinitesimal with something larger.

Language cannot remedy the inchoate terror of the climate emergency, but it may offer a way to reconfigure the terror—salvaging it from abstraction, despondency, disconnection, and abandonment. The Limits of My Language are the Limits of My World intends to break through to and reveal emotions that remain unclear to us, going beyond the rudimentary vocabulary of the English language. The exhibition moves beyond the written and spoken into the space of the visual, drawing out and giving weight to the quivering, wordless experiences that lie behind language. In this way, our emotions become marked but not fixed, oscillating between ambiguity and some semblance of order—rendered permeable and discernible, albeit neither stable nor definitive. The artworks presented here capture our shared vulnerability and complexity as individuals, helping us to orient ourselves before we lose our emotional compass for enduring in unimaginable circumstances, before anticipation dissolves into nothing.