End user
In this month-long reckoning with objects, Cynthia Schwertsik’s exhibition Green Wash invites visitors to bring unwanted items into the gallery for disposal. Drawing on the power of ritual in helping humans work through difficult problems, the artist aims to facilitate a public process of shedding.
Unfolding as a series of durational performances, Schwertsik intends to break down the donated objects, reconfiguring the remnants into assemblages, and then covering the smashed mess – a landscape, of sorts – with a coat of verdant green paint. Schwertsik describes the project as a proposition, challenging guilt-laden sustainability narratives, which place the onus of responsibility for disposal on the end user.
In a wide-ranging practice spanning decades that the artist describes as a meandering evolution, certain through-lines emerge – an interest in site, performance, participation and poetics, linked by an off-kilter absurdist humour – influenced by the artist’s prior professional experience in theatre and dance. Through her work, Schwertsik explores what I feel like the world is for me. By that, she means what it means to be alive, to be a person.
Over several decades, the artist has honed her experimental, artistic process across a range of projects in Australia and internationally. Central to the development of new work is creating the conditions for things to emerge through collaboration and context. At times, the primary expression of a work has been creating a space for listening.
In Bestowed, the precursor project to Green Wash, the artist invited individuals to bring in a personal item into the gallery and share the significance of the object in their lives. In relieving memories, Schwertsik’s subjects experienced their precious thing as a responsibility, even a burden. Their possessions elicited a similar response in her. I can’t hold on to everything. I need to find ways to let go.
Schwertsik has developed Green Wash through a series of residencies in robust discussion with OSCA Artistic Director Paul Gazzola, shaping the work’s direction collaboratively.
I first visited the artist in Port Adelaide, where, as part of a two-week residency at Vitalstatistix, she was experimenting with pulverising things and painting over them. We sat on chairs surrounded by broken toys and ugly household items. It was hard to hold on to a thought. Our conversation shifted between pessimistic topics in a fragmented fashion. Schwertsik spoke about gender and social conditioning in which care is largely ascribed and attributed to women. Smashing things feels freeing, but also unnatural.
Surveying the wreckage in the small shop front, the world did not feel beautiful. We agreed that capitalism, overconsumption and environmental degradation in the wake of industrialisation had devastated the planet. Weeks later, on the phone with the exhibition fast approaching, the tone was much lighter. Schwertsik had recently returned from Europe, where she had joined in celebrating her father’s 90th birthday in Austria, the country of her birth and where her father lives and continues to work as a composer. She recalled a conversation between them about living sustainably. He said You do know that contemporary society is built upon so many unsustainable practices, that maybe the only solution is that we stop breathing.
At that, we laughed.
Anna thanks and acknowledges Cynthia Schwertsik, who generously shared their thoughts and perspectives. July 2025
Anna Zagala is a writer, editor, educator and cultural producer and Associate Curator at Samstag Museum of Art.
Green Wash is part of OSCA’s state-wide artist commissioning initiative Projects of the Everyday, that seeds, develops and presents artist-led projects in innovative spaces of creativity, making and experimentation.
Floating Goose, 1 – 24 August 2025 as part of SALA
Concept, design and performance: Cynthia Schwertsik
Collaboration, design and construction: Paul Gazzola
Graphic design and photography: Rosina Possingham
Video: George Graetz
Assistants: Susan Charlton, Caspar Hawksley & Alice McCool
Special thanks to: All the team at Vitalstatistix and Fabrik, Renate Nesi, Rachel McElwee, Fulvia Mantelli, Jennifer Mills & Caspar White.
Supported by Create SA, Creative Australia, Creative Partnerships Australia, Vitalstatistix and Floating Goose Studios.