The photograph is the husk, shell or rind of reality, the mere chaff of life, thrown off, according to Honoré de Balzac’s theory related by Nadar, as an infinite number of skins — so that every time someone had their photograph taken, one was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph; repeated exposures detach subsequent layers, and thus, the very essence of life. That same process is happening to the Great Barrier Reef.

Sculptures and photographs at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, until 25 February continue Nicholas Mangan‘s Core-Coralations project in an exhibition subtitled Death Assemblages that takes this concept further; think of the casting of voids in Pompeiian pumice and ash to produce in plaster replicas of the vanished corpses vaporised by the extreme heat.

Mangan demonstrates the value in peeling back an idea to its core. He says;

“For as long as I can remember, I have been pulling things apart – attempting to understand them – and then putting them back together (but not always in the same way).”

A bone-whiteness pervades his installation as Mangan (*1979, Geelong) considers mass coral bleaching events. He offers iconic evidence of our dangerously heating planet that will lead to humans’ extinction, preceded by that of so many other species, including the coral polyp.

Coral death as a result of fossil fuel and petrochemical extraction is embodied in three small sculptural works titled Coral Ossuaries after the funerary casket for secondary burial of exhumed skeletal remains; a larger work Sarcophagi; and a series of photomedia on paper.

In the Coral Ossuaries—what appear to be polystyrene ‘wet boxes’ that are used worldwide for long-distance transport of the fish catch are in fact cast from ‘coral bone’ fragments sold for fish tank filters, so are made of the limestone skeleton left after the death of coral polyps. They are fossils of the Anthropocene combining our plastic that chokes the seas, and the death of its creatures that we are causing.

Deriving as it does from the Greek words for ‘flesh’ and ‘eating’, Sarcophagi [perhaps the plural is used here to denote the industrial reproduction of this form] is again moulded from coral-derived limestone, to form one of those ubiquitous concrete ‘Jersey’ barriers found on freeway dividers and construction sites and thus refers to the Great Barrier Reef, at the same time as being a coffin for that vast community of organisms under threat of sea temperature rises due to climate change. This is however a moveable barrier, borne on an industrial-strength Fiberglass Reinforced Polymer (FRP) bier with castors as if for an especially austere funeral.

Photosynthetic Zooxanthellae (algae) that live inside the tissue of the polyps are responsible for 90% of their nutrients, and for their saturated colour. As the water temperature rises, they produce a toxin, so the coral expels the zooxanthellae and the coral tissue becomes transparent, revealing the coral skeleton made of calcium carbonate, in which the polyps eventually starve or die of disease.

Mangan visited the, accommodatingly photogenic, oceanic research laboratory Seasim, The Coral Archive which houses the world’s largest coral cores, drilled and sliced from 350 Great Barrier Reef coral colonies between 1983–2007, and the Heron Island Research Station. It is from those facilities that Mangan takes his cue for the use of the square profile steel work bench supports and FRP Grill which is used in the experimental tanks.

Among Mangan’s photographs taken there are pictures of second-generation corals bred by scientists to endure higher temperatures. To represent this scientific study, Mangain presents a series of negative images in which corals—brain-like forms in black against the correspondingly bleached-blank notepad rests of chairs such as you would find in a university tutorial room—conduct a mute conversazione.

For a colour image of the same situation Mangan superimposes imagery taken in the lab of live coral, a technique applied in a series in which heightened hues are inverted with reorientated, superimposed montage elements. Highly saturated, these make present, but also strange, the colours we admire, and now mourn, in the iconic Reef. We are in some cases left uncertain of scale, so that these may be aerial views of vast tracts of the sea, or abstractions from the microscopic world of the polyp. Scientific measurement prevails over both.

Mangan’s casts are in effect three-dimensional photographs; fossils compressed into harsh colourless industrial forms which preserve in their textures a reminder of their origins, while the ultraviolet fluorescence of the digital prints asserts that it is unnatural, anthropogenic heat that is the cause of the corals’ demise. Colour taunts the viewer’s optimistic visual memory of the Reef, and its artifice mocks the vain hopes that science alone will somehow ‘fix it.’

This eloquent distillation of the contestation at the interface of science, society and nature extends ongoing work by Mangan that is documented in a series of book publications; Nicholas Mangan : between a rock and a hard place (2009) published by the Art Gallery of New South Waes; Nicholas Mangan : notes from a cretaceous world (2010) in which Shelley McSpedden discusses his The Colony, 2005, The Mutant Message, 2006, A1 Southwest Stone, 2008 and Nauru, 2010; Some kinds of duration (2012); and Termite economics (2021). Copies of some are available at Sutton Gallery.