Pool Of Content: Fremantle Biennale 2025

The 2025 Fremantle Biennale is now into its second week. Sanctuary is the theme of this year’s festival.

One of my favourite installations is Pool of Content by Melbourne-based artists Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler. The installation is showing in The 1907 Old Customs House, one of Freo’s very early 20th century buildings built by the then new Federal Government for the new Federal Department of Customs.

In this light-filled space the artists have created several pools of pink water. This speculative salt landscape in inspired by WA’s pink lakes. WA has many pink lakes—Hutt Lagoon near Esperance, Lake Hillier near Kalbarri, and the Pink Lakes of Rottnest. The pink colour comes from salt-loving microorganisms, Dunaliella Salina that produce a carotene like pigment.

These ecosystems are fragile: climate change, water extraction, and other pressures are threatening their colour and ecological balance. By using pink-lake imagery, the installation draws attention to this fragility and the deep time of these landscapes, and how they formed over millennia.

The installation is created using a series of trays with water and crystalline salts and a natural dye to create the pink colour. The salt crystals grow inside the installation – so the pieces evolve; it’s a living and growing artwork.

Conceptually, the installation reflects on human-nature relationships, extraction, ecology, and how “nature itself is consumed as spectacle.” By bringing pink-lake-like environments into a this old building, the work also comments on colonial and early federation histories and our impact on natural landscapes.

It’s visually powerful but also conceptually deep: the slow crystal growth and the reality that so many salt lakes are a result of our impact on the environment due to deforestation and non-native animals. The early settlers exported salt from Western Australia and Rottnest Island.

When: until 30 November 2025. Thursday to Sunday, 11am – 8pm.

Entry: Free

Accessibility: The venue is heritage-listed; there is wheelchair access via a ramp.

*Story and photographs by Jean Hudson @jeansodyssey

Jean Hudson is our Shipping and Sailing Correspondent and also a regular feature writer, reviewer and photographer here on the Shipping News. You may also like to follow up her informative Places I Love stories, as well as other feature stories and Freo Today photographs, right here.

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