By arts editor HELEN MUSA

Afternoon of the Harpies promises, or perhaps threatens, to be an exhibition of phantasmagoria, fantastical creatures, insect angels, vessels for incarnation, carpets and luminescent fish-trap spaceships by two of the Canberra region’s most provocative and adventurous artists.

Sculptor Stephen Harrison and poet, photographer and artist Judith Nangala Crispin have long explored the darker reaches of human and animal experience.

Crispin, whose illustrated verse novel The Dingo’s Noctuary recently won the Marion Halligan Award, is known for her haunting “afterlife” portraits of road-killed animals, baby dingoes, birds and other native creatures placed on emulsion and developed in natural light on Lumachrome glass prints.

Harrison, meanwhile, has spent years investigating vanished species such as the thylacine in drawings and sculpture, often incorporating his work into gravestones. Between them, Harrison, who lives in Murrumbateman, and Crispin, who lives between Bungendore and Braidwood, have plenty of opportunity to observe the quiet tragedies unfolding on the region’s roads.

Now they have turned to the classics in an enigmatic collaboration inspired by the Harpyiai, the Harpies of Homeric poetry and Greek mythology, personifications of catastrophic winds, hurricanes and violent storms. Half human and half bird, these winged creatures symbolised unheeded prophecies and elemental forces defending animals and birds against human hubris.

The appearance of a Harpy was said to herald famine, war, pestilence or the fall of indifferent angels. Today, the artists suggest, we face different but equally unsettling omens, the consequences of our betrayal of nature, our greed and our failure to heed the warnings carried on the wind, or in the silence left by disappearing insects. Yet, they insist, “we celebrate the light that remains.”

“The creative collaboration between Stephen and I emerges from a shared love of all things art, and an engagement with animals, country, mythology and poetry,” Crispin says. Among her contributions is a fish-trap spaceship woven from fibre-optic cable, giving some indication of where this exhibition is prepared to travel.

Working across photography, sculpture and installation, the pair have blended distinctive photographic processes with painterly and sculptural forms to explore mortality, the unseen and the mysterious relationships between humans, the natural world and whatever may lie beyond.

Afternoon of the Harpies, Grainger Gallery, 34 Geelong Street, Fyshwick, August 13 to 30.

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