Nature Speaks: FY (Wrapped Coast) is one of two paintings based on Christo’s designs for Wrapped Coast, Little Bay (1969), which Tillers produced in lead up to the 50-year anniversary of the significant artwork. The second, larger painting formed part of his installation A New World Rises exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2019 for Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects.

Tillers participated in Wrapped Coast, Little Bay (1969) as a 19-year-old Architecture student, and the experience encouraged him to become an avant-garde artist. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been a significant and constant influence on Tillers’ work, particularly in terms of the ephemeral nature of his practice. Keith Broadfoot has argued that the fundamental aspects of Tillers’ canvasboard project may have been indebted to key aspects of Christo’s practice:

“With Tillers’ canvasboards, which can be placed on the wall, arranged to form a painting, or alternatively stacked on the floor to form a sculpture, the connecting formal element is a flattened pedestal that has become mobile. As with Wrapped Coast, Little Bay (1969) it was not only a transitory event but made of what should be stable and immobile – Australia – something destabilised and in transit, so Tillers gives to what should be a permanent and constant form – a painting – quite contrary qualities. Even more like Wrapped Coast, Little Bay (1969), though, if Tillers’ work displays not its solidity but its ability to be easily dismantled and conveniently stacked or better, if its underlying defining form is a package – the canvasboards can be parcelled and bundled ready for easy delivery – then it is as though it is the potential transporting of the work, its circulation, its overtaking by the logic of exchange value, and ultimately its exportability, that is on display.”[1]

[1] Keith Broadfoot (2014) “Australian Art on the Move: Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast”, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 14:1, 58-75.