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LIVING WATER in flux 2019
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Moving into Darkness 2019
Evoking the Arctic environment, this installation of floor drawing, sound, light, temperature and digital image invites the viewer to traverse the room as they experience a rendition of the polar landscape. The installation is the realisation of a 2017 Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard using field data gathered from the trip.
A representation of the Arctic ice-cap at the time of the residency has been drawn onto the floor using recycled bedsheets, pulped into cotton fibre. An ultra-violet bulb suspended above the wet drawing casts a deep blue glow, highlighting the textures and patterns of the 'ice-flow'. On the wall behind, a large-scale print of a Svalbard glacier, overlaid with an enlarged ink drawing using English water, waits dimly in the blue glow until thrown into sharp relief for 5 seconds every minute. An ambient soundtrack of ice, ocean, human and machine recordings from the Arctic plays in the background.
Called to Account 2019
Extreme weather events such as floods are on the increase and yet we are not hearing the urgency of the need for change. The young are calling my generation to account: to listen, to hear, to see and to act.
Consisting of the projection of an Auslan translation of Greta Thunberg's speech to the 2018 UN COP24 Climate Change Conference onto a small tank of water and mud from the 2017 Lismore flood, the viewer is drawn in by the gestures and facial expressions of the signer reflected into and on the water. By putting on the headphones, the visual message being conveyed so dynamically is audibly revealed to the viewer upon hearing student climate activist Greta Thunberg's distinctive voice.
Mantle Rising 2019
A handmade larger than life sheet of paper made from pulped recycled cotton bedsheets soaked in river mud from the Lismore flood, traverses the floor rising up to the ceiling in a monolithic form. A laser level tilt mechanism imperceptibly and incrementally moves a red line along, up, then back down the textured flood paper in an eternal looping cycle of tide and flood. The line picks up the textures and details of the paper terrain as it dances across the floor, suggestive of the beauty and value of a natural flood plain when in balance with the earth's rhythms. The red mark settles into a flat line as it rises up the vertical wall of flood paper in recognition of the sense of overwhelm and disaster of extreme flooding when out of balance.
Post flood palimpsest 2019
Following Cyclone Debbie in 2017, the City of Lismore experienced a one in 100-year flood. Many properties were flooded as the levy broke and homes and businesses and homes were washed out. Following the flood, after the waters had receded, the community of Lismore came together to rebuild and support each other in a deeply moving and effective way. The besser blocks in this shop building still hold the floodwaters within them, the wet blocks drawing a pattern on the freshly rendered wall. A visual reminder that the voice of the river is held in the structure, the story of the flood is retold, a story that recedes more slowly than the urgent pace of human regeneration.
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