We Are Exploding – An Immersive Exhibition on Air and Climate by Abbotsford Convent

Abbotsford Convent will present We Are Exploding, a major new exhibition by award-winning artist Emily Parsons-Lord, from 14 to 23 November 2025 in the Magdalen Laundry.

Exploring air as both material and metaphor, We Are Exploding will invite audiences to experience the climate crisis through sight, sound and sensation. Across two immersive installations – Things Fall Apart and Trembling – Parsons-Lord will transform the invisible materials of the atmosphere into a physical encounter with a planet in crisis.

Artist Emily Parsons-Lord describes the exhibition as an invitation to shift our perception of time and planetary change. “We Are Exploding asks us to imagine what it means to live through an ongoing planetary event – a slow-motion explosion that began with the Industrial Revolution and continues to reverberate. By bringing together materials of the climate crisis – from CO2 to meteorites – I hope to create a sensory encounter with the air we share, holding together the planetary scale with our intimate individual engagement. Air is inside our bodies – we are breathing it – the politics are urgent and immediate.”

Things Fall Apart is a remount of a 2017 work developed with plant communication specialist Monica Gagliano. A column of mist infused with methyl jasmonate – a pheromone plants release under environmental distress – will fall into a vast circular void. Visitors are invited to stand beneath and breathe in this invisible warning signal, one that humans can smell but have not evolved to understand.

Trembling will suspend materials of the climate crisis within blocks of dry ice made from CO2 recovered from beer and wine production. These materials include fragments of the KT boundary (the geological marker left by the meteorite that ended the dinosaurs), lead shot collected from shooting ranges, carbon captured from air pollution and meteorites. As the dry ice sublimates, the materials will fall onto amplified ceramic surfaces cast from the Magdalen Laundry’s original bricks. Their impacts transform into sound, revealing the slow accumulations of disastrous force.

Set within the Convent’s unrestored Magdalen Laundry, the exhibition responds to the site’s layered history – human, environmental and geological.

Abbotsford Convent CEO Justine Hyde says We Are Exploding embodies the organisation’s commitment to supporting artists who explore the intersection of art, science and ecology. “We are delighted to co-present We Are Exploding here at the Convent. Emily’s provocation successfully combines wonder and spectacle with the immediacy of critical climate action. The artist invites audiences to witness how reclaimed materials interplay, transform and perform in the low-intervention space of the unrestored southern section of the Magdalen Laundry, encouraging an alternative and impactful way to experience our surroundings and exchange ideas. This project perfectly aligns with the Convent’s values and focus on environmental stewardship and local, place-based cultural programming.”

Presented in partnership with the artist, We Are Exploding extends beyond the gallery through a dedicated public program on 15 and 16 November, featuring a Cultural Walk with Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Senior Environmental Educator Joe Costello, an Artist in Conversation with Jeff Khan – Creative Director AsiaTOPA, a sound performance by Evelyn Ida Morris, and readings from writers Nisha Madhan, Tahmina Maskinyar and Roslyn Orlando responding to the work.

More information: abbotsfordconvent.com.au/event/we-are-exploding