As It Is Now marks Messums’ first New York exhibition, an ambitious group show that encapsulates the UK-based gallery’s long-standing commitment to art that engages with the environment and strives for sustainability. Opening September 2, 2025 in Detour gallery, and running for nearly two weeks, the exhibition brings together works by Sammy Hawker, Tuesday Riddell, Tyga Helme, Laurence Edwards, Jelly Green and Yan Wang Preston. The show will be presented adjacent to a retrospective on Peter Brown and his paintings of New York, underscoring founder Johnny Messum’s mission to connect international audiences with artists from the UK and Australia. With established locations in Wiltshire and London and a new site opening in Lowestoft in 2026, this New York display brings a piece of Messums’ ethos to the American metropolis, deepening their transnational dialogue between art, ecology, and place.
The exhibition title, As It Is Now, is declarative, yet elusive. It conveys a sense of urgency that appears omnipresent, yet out of reach to the viewer. In what way “It” is, or “It” may manifest itself becomes a question for gallery-goers to complete. What’s evident is that Messums’ show promises elucidation on the state of current affairs, a deep dive into a corrupted zeitgeist defined by the climate crisis, while also eliciting imaginings of what “It” may eventually look like. Messum’s perspective is not fatalistic, but rather open-ended, gesturing towards an alternative future away from the Anthropocene. It is through Sammy Hawker’s work in particular that one begins to see Messums’ guiding philosophy take visual and conceptual form.
Sammy Hawker, a photographer and multimedia artist based in Australia, works primarily in Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country. As a graduate with honors from Sydney College of the Arts, Hawker has exhibited widely across Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and New South Wales (NSW). Her work has been collected by the Canberra Museum & Gallery, the ACT Legislative Assembly, Canberra Hospital, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, and Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre. She began her career working as a documentary filmmaker for arts and environmental organizations, later incorporating photography and chromatography into her independent practice. Over time, she developed a personal and experimental visual language rooted in a deep connection to the land and a concern for ecological balance. Her process is grounded in what she calls “facilitated acts of co-creation” with nature. Whether it be developing photographs using natural materials or facilitating the expression of spectrums of color from organic matter through chromatography, she constantly challenges the limits of human control and proposes an ethic of reciprocity with the natural world through artmaking.
Sammy Hawker, Honeycomb #3, 2023
&
Humpback whale migrating south, 2024.
In her oeuvre, the personal and the natural are inseparable. Her environmental commitment took form while living on a bush property an hour north of the ACT, an area affected by both Eucalyptus dieback and the 2019/2020 Black Summer Fires. This experience awakened not despair, but a growing attunement to the resilience of Australian ecosystems. Over time, she came to recognize nature’s cyclical logic, its capacity for destruction, transformation, and regrowth. For Hawker, conceiving ecosystem collapse as final is rooted in an anthropocentric, linear worldview. Her work resists that perspective, instead portraying the environment’s regenerative possibilities, and postulating that nature needs to be approached with care and humility. Her goal: “to draw people’s attention to the natural world, and for people to really consider the sentience of beings and places—outside of a loud capitalist mindset.” Hawker’s practice emerges from a space of surrender and respect for natural processes. However, rather than evoking passivity, this submission to the elements and the processes of organic matter remains intellectually engaged. Her work intends to dismantle ideological myths of human dominance and to open up space for new modes of relating to the world that consider the role of the ecosystem in and of itself.
Her introduction to Messums came through The Corridor Project, an artist residency on Wiradjuri Country in regional Australia, designed to engage the land as both subject and medium. Having grown up nearby, Hawker already had a strong connection to this area, which has deepened through her visits to The Corridor Project over the years. This residency experience has helped define her exploration of interspecies and intercultural relationships. “I think all those different threads have helped inform my sense of seeing the unseen things in the land,” she explains, crediting both scientific methodologies and the energetic, relational knowledge shared with First Nations collaborators, as intrinsic to her practice.
Through these exchanges, Hawker developed a nuanced, postcolonial awareness in her work, recognizing the labor, knowledge, and wisdom of Australia’s Indigenous communities, and the importance of not reproducing colonial dynamics of appropriation as an artist. “Any artist working with Country needs to both listen and remain in evolving dialogue around their approach to a respectful place-based practice.” she says.
Images courtesy of Lean Timms.
One of Hawker’s most characteristic techniques is chromatography, a method she uses to facilitate the visual expression of vibrant matter without human interference. After experimenting with seawater to develop photographs, she turned to this botanical technique to analyze soil and organic matter, to draw out pigments from different materials and beings and create abstract compositions that express their chemical essence. These pieces result in circular cutouts that resemble woodcuts, each one a distinct, infallible, haunting portrait of a being as a spectrum of color. Often, as in one of the pieces on display at Messums, her subjects are deceased beings, such as caterpillars, which are gently honored through her process of chromatographic immortalization.
Chromatography, in Hawker’s hands, becomes a kind of requiem, a post-mortem metamorphosis that distills the subject into its elemental components. These pieces are at once memento mori and meditations on the intangible, infinite, and mutable nature of existence. Her work gestures toward a spiritual unity and an unseen connectivity residing in every insect, tree, and molecule, revealed only through an interaction between natural and scientific-humane processes. And this connection can only be resuscitated through careful inspection and in-syncness with her art as a viewer.
Sammy Hawker,
Caterpillars in Metamorphosis (diptych), 2023
Sammy Hawker’s work embodies Messums’ invitation for viewers to slow down and see differently: to reimagine their place in a global ecological web. As It Is Now hopes to cultivate moments of reflection amid urban pace; to remind us of where we come from, and what we could head towards, of our interconnectedness with the environments we inhabit and affect. Through Hawker’s work and the broader exhibition, the gallery asks audiences to confront the present honestly, but also help build a more reciprocal and regenerative future. From Basta, we can’t wait to visit the space and learn more about the artists on view in a few days.