Lucas Ihlein

Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein with Simon Mattsson and Kim Kleidon and community collaborators, Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers, Mackay, Queensland, 2017
Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein with Simon Mattsson and Kim Kleidon and community collaborators, Sunset Symphony in the Sunflowers, Mackay, Queensland, 2017

bio:

Lucas Ihlein is an artist whose work explores the relationship between socially engaged art, agriculture and environmental stewardship. He is a founding member of artists’ collectives SquatSpace, Big Fag Press, Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC) and Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), and The Rizzeria printing collective. Over the last 5 years he has been collaborating with Kim Williams on the project Sugar vs the Reef? in Mackay, Queensland.

statement:

During 2018-19 Lucas Ihlein worked with physicist, engineer, farmer and inventor Allan Yeomans, whose latest innovation is the Yeomans Carbon Still – a device for measuring soil carbon sequestration. In early 2019, as part of their collaborative project called Baking Earth, Ihlein and Yeomans demonstrated the Yeomans Carbon Still in a major exhibition entitled Shapes of Knowledge, curated by Hannah Mathews at the Monash University Museum of Art. The device was used for public demonstrations with local farmers to show its effectiveness as a tool for encouraging widespread transformation of farming practices. The Baking Earth project explored methods for bringing together policymakers and farmers, to encourage Australia’s carbon reductions program to be more inclusive of rural knowledge.

Lucas Ihlein with Allan Yeomans and Rhiannon Sutton Yeomans, Baking Earth: Soil and the Carbon Economy, Monash University Museum of Art. Allan, the inventor of the Yeomans Carbon Still, teaches his granddaughter Rhiannon how to use the machine, photo: Christian Capurro
2024 Artists