

Pool of Content
A luminous hue engulfs the room, serene, dreamlike, otherworldly. Fremantle’s Old Customs House is transformed in a surreal intervention by artist duo Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler. Deceptively inviting, Pool of Content presents a speculative landscape: a mirrored body of water spills through the heart of this colonial structure, a gesture that echoes the terraforming of Fremantle Harbour, revealing the enduring tension between colonial histories and ecology.
Drawing from the vastness of geological time inscribed across Western Australia’s landscape, the work contrasts the slow formation of ancient ecologies with the accelerating pace of human disruption. Pink lakes, with their vivid hues and haunting stillness, become both subject and lens. Formed over millennia, these hyper-saline environments shelter halophilic microorganisms: salt-loving life that flourishes where most cannot. At once alien and resilient, they offer a glimpse into potential post-human futures, where life persists beyond the limits of human habitability.
In an era of ecological crisis, Pool of Content repositions these altered environments within a contemporary frame, asking not only what is extracted from the Earth, but how nature itself is consumed as spectacle, commodified and circulated within the attention economy.
Our present moment marks a tipping point, where social and political structures stand in conflict with ecological systems, extracting more than they sustain. Pool of Content offers a moment of quiet pause. Through this mirrored expanse, Bae and Lawler invite reflection on human impact, shifting ecologies and the slow, enduring rhythm of nature’s evolution.
This new commission for SANCTUARY 25 continues the artists’ ongoing inquiry into environmental memory, extractive histories and the ways we inhabit and unsettle the land beneath us.
Date and Time
OLD CUSTOMS HOUSE
13-30 Nov (Thur-Sun)
11am – 8pm
Entry
Free
Image Credit
Courtesy the artists; PHOTO Three By Bryony Jackson
Wona Bae (South Korea) and Charlie Lawler (Australia) are an artist duo. Their collaborative practice explores the complex interconnected relationships between humans and the ecosystems they inhabit. Bae and Lawler are interested in discourse surrounding environmental debate, interrogating the contradictory logics embedded within social, political and ecological structures.
Through installation, sculpture, data, video and archival media, their work traverses a line of inquiry spanning past, present, and future ecologies. Seeking to re-contextualise humans evolving relationship with the natural world. Bae and Lawler’s immersive installations deconstruct familiar forms, recasting natural systems and data, searching for new ways of making sense of the world.
Bae and Lawler’s recent curated exhibitions include Nexus: Totality, Dark Mofo, Hobart (2025) Strata, 3rd Bankstown Biennale, Sydney (2024-2025), Field of Vision, Korean Cultural Centre,Sydney (2024), Present Being, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2023/2024). Daily Archive, Gujung Art Center, Onyang Museum, South Korea (2022); The National 3: Australian Art Now, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2021), and En Route, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2019/20). Recent solo exhibitions include Perimeters, Bruny NORTH, Tasmania (2025), Deep Time, Daine Singer, Melbourne (2024), Late, Passage Gallery, Sydney (2023) and Park Dream, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale (2023). In 2024, they were awarded the North Sydney Art Prize for Late and have been finalists in prestigious Australian art prizes, including the Deakin Contemporary Small Sculpture Award (2024), Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize (2024), and Wynne Prize (2022).
Old Customs House
8 Phillimore St,
Fremantle
More information coming soon…
More information coming soon…
More information coming soon…