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Between Worlds at Caboolture Hub Gallery February 2020

In our life space there is no escaping the daily information that flashes the emergency before us: coral bleaching, oceans of plastic, extinctions, catastrophic fires, poisoned aquifers, drought, extreme weather.  How do we find a way to face this and make hope? How do we transition out of panic, disconnection and depression into hope-making?

I personally start with grief in the face of climate change and environmental catastrophe. This has been a base note playing through our lives for decades as we have witnessed the decline of natural systems.

But/and I also start with connection – the particular sense of self only found within forests and natural spaces.

I move through this towards a response to the statement by Charles Massy “…we humans do have the capacity to address and turn around the Anthropocene era and thus pull back Earth’s operating systems to safer and longer-lasting levels.” (Massy, 2017:371).

Reference

Massy, C. (2017). Call of the Reed Warbler: UQP

Media

The work combines beeswax encaustic and cyanotypes, mounted on upcycled timber offcuts. Most of the work is of an intimate scale.

Encaustic like us can only tolerate a moderate temperature range – melting at 74◦C and freezing/cracking at 0◦C.

Cyanotypes reference my personal history, Prussian ancestors who settled in Jarowair and Gaibal land in the 1860s during the period of the frontier wars. The cyanotypes of course chemically react to the sun. We are all reacting… being formed, shaped, coloured by this land.

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