‘Art versus extinction’ – it sounds like a war cry for artists. For those who create and despair. For storytellers and picture makers and agitators everywhere. For anyone who wants to live on this planet alongside its other inhabitants, not instead of them.

It’s also the heart of Moira Finucane’s extraordinary art event, The Rapture Chapter II: Art vs Extinction.

The Rapture Chapter II: Art vs Extinction is showing as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival from 4-29 September 2019. It builds on and leaps off and explodes from The Rapture, Finucane’s multi award-winning and globally acclaimed 2017 art piece. Chapter II is infused with land, culture and spirit, the result of an epic exploration of antipodean natural wonders and the thousands of years of narrative we have spun around them. Finucane voyaged from the Tiwi Islands to Australia’s red heart and all the way down to Antarctica to develop the work, collaborating with First Nations peoples, scientists and artists along the way. The resulting show brings all the passion, professionalism, erotic-rock-goddess-fallen-angel transcendent genius she is known for and takes square aim at Earth’s looming environmental catastrophe.

One critic urged people to see The Rapture because: ‘in seeing this show you will feel like you’re making history’. We are all complicit in our own history, and that includes the health of the planet and what we do to stand up for it. Finucane is fighting with her art. She invites you to do the same, and through a collaboration with Fifteen Trees, Finucane offers the opportunity to make your own solid material gesture of hope.

One tree has been planted for every table sold in the current season of The Rapture Chapter II: Art vs Extinction. 

Four (400) hundred of those trees have gone to Flowerdale Landcare, and four hundred and eighty-eight (488) to the Westgate Park project. Two very different sites, both gradually being rehabilitated after devastating human-fuelled activity (bushfires and urban development). Digging holes in chilly windswept ditches might seem a far cry from the glamour and aching glitzy beauty of a world-class apocalyptic cabaret performance, but is it? It’s the same spectrum of activism. We fight with what we have. Finucane knows this. We know it at Fifteen Trees.

Would you like to do more for our native environment?

Join Moira Finucane and Fifteen Trees in supporting our communities and their tree planting projects.

Fifteen Trees can plant any number of trees on your behalf. Here’s some ideas to get you thinking.

Article by Sarah Hart.

Sarah is an emerging self-taught artist whose passions include the stories and experiences of women and narrative driven creative work. Her aim is to delight, to reveal glimpses of everyday beauty, and to celebrate flights of the ordinary. Sarah works across a range of media, with an abiding interest in pen and ink, mixed media and the human form.