At the Montsalvat Barn Gallery, eight artists consider the impact of colonialism and industrialisation on our countryside and waterways through their creations. This exhibition is both an elegy for a lost natural world and a call to action. Whether, in the future, we will look back on our time as a past of apathy or action remains to be seen; thus, our future pasts are full of possibility.

Future Pasts brings together artists whose practices engage with eco-feminism, climate consciousness, environmental repair, conservation, and the deep relationality between people and place. Building on Australia’s colonial and industrial history, the artists interrogate a past of environmental destruction, from the gold rush era to the present day. While some works breathe new life into neglected relics, transforming the unwanted into the desirable, others speculate on a tenuous future, pondering the possible salvation or further destruction of the bush.

Each artist reflects on our current era of ecological and historical rupture — an Anthropocene inheritance marked by extraction, disconnection, and profound environmental change — while also imagining new ways of being with land, non-human kin, and the more-than-human world. Through the reconstruction of past human interactions with nature and through the creation of imaginary futures, this exhibition explores themes of natural restoration, resilience, memory, and interdependence, aiming to open a dialogue through which humanity might restore its connection to the natural world, re-centre care, and envision futures shaped by reciprocity rather than depletion.