Mother’s Little Helpers
1 February 2025 - 7 June 2025
Curator:
Artist: Karla Dickens
Artists:
Location: Incinerator Billboards
This exhibition, presented across three billboards located at Incinerator Gallery, reflects a growing rebellion over the silence and inaction of our country’s powerbrokers and general populace towards climate change. Through these photographs, Lismore-based Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens highlights a rebellion often dismissed as inconvenient and calls for protest only taking place through conventional means.
Karla has been involved in green politics for some time now—she started with Greenpeace 30 years ago—and sees climate discourse stuck in endless repetition. For her, the focus must now shift to hearing Country—taking time to listen to the land itself and build a deeper understanding of Country.
In 2018, as part of the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation project, Karla collaborated with Bruce Pascoe—renowned Indigenous writer of Bunurong, Yuin, and Aboriginal Tasmanian heritage, and author of Dark Emu—and Brendan Blacklock, alongside children from Bingara Central School. Together, they created the short film Mother’s Little Helpers, filmed in February 2019 amid extreme heat and nearby fires.
In the film, Bruce situates himself in the landscape symbolically and didactically as a messenger—one who represents Mother Earth. Wearing a long loose jacket with the large words Mother Earth Country, he reflects a call for men to adopt nurturing, mothering roles and show greater respect for women and land. The landscape—a scene of burnt trees, skulls, dust, and desolation—evokes death, while the presence of children introduces a flicker of hope. Cloaked with words like respect, listen, culture, and protect, the children embody the responsibility of future generations, coming together with Mother Earth as a glimmer of hope and possibility of spiritual renewal.
Silent yet dreamlike, Karla’s stills drawn from the film balance stark realism with a poetic edge. As she writes, “it’s the viewers’ responsibility to look hard, learn quick, and listen deeply.” The work’s title nods to the Rolling Stones’ song Mother’s Little Helper, hinting at escapism amid societal collapse.
Karla’s accompanying poem amplifies this urgency:
No coloured pills for mother today,
overdosing on crooked Bandaids...
Too late for flowers, hold her hand,
hug her tight, love her through long, dark nights.
Through powerful and confrontational imagery, Karla insists on facing this reality with care, respect and action.