Dark Mofo Nexus: Totality: Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler

Nexus: Totality (2025) Nexus: Totality is a meditation on balance and time, on the unseen forces that shape the universe through relation rather than singularity. At its heart lies the ancient principle of yin and yang (음양), a cornerstone of Korean philosophy, where dualities, such as light and dark, life and death, order and chaos, are not opposites, but mirrors, continuously folding into one another.

At this critical moment of ecological crisis, the work reflects on humanity’s interaction with the ecosystems they inhabit. Through the lens of opposing temporal scales, it strives to understand the vastness of deep geological time in relation to the fleeting nature of human timescales.

At one end Nexus: Totality is shaped by the silhouette of a stone from the boulder fields of kunanyi/Mount Wellington. The other resolves into a perfect circle, a recurring motif in Bae and Lawler’s work, symbolising harmony and the cyclical nature of life. Between these forms, the sculpture unfolds in a slow, deliberate sequence. Like a capillary wave tracing the subtle exchange between forces. It is a study in causality, in attunement, in the balance that underlies all living things.

As the viewer circles the sculpture, form begins to blur, individual rings dissolve into a singular, collapsing space and perception inward. What was once front becomes back; what seemed outside reveals itself as inside. From one vantage, the edge holds the weight of stone, the centre a perfect void. Yet with each step, the roles quietly reverse in a shifting dialogue.