Extinction and the Art of Erasing: Lucienne Rickard's Extinction Studies

When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic artist Lucienne Rickard started a twelve-month duration performance called ​ Extinction Studies​. Each day, with pencil on a single piece of paper, she draws a recently extinct species, only to erase it as soon as its image is complete. The performance takes place at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), a location saturated with histories of local mass extinction events. Two rooms away from Rickard’s performance, another exhibition shows the bones,skins and some of the last known images of the Tasmanian tiger (​Thylacinus cynocephalus​). The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions draws out the relationship between extinction and the act of erasing. This paper examines the affective nature of erasure and extinction. Rickard’s care for each line she draws and erases, reinforces the physical and emotional investment that twenty-first-century extinction events compel. The difference between the two exhibitions is one of scale and time. Where the permanent thylacine exhibition performs the long durée of erasure and ‘extinction afterlives’ of a single species thought lost since 1936, ​ Extinction Studies simultaneously shows the fast-paced acts of erasure of many species thought lost since the turn of the twenty-first-century.