Visual Arts
OPEN CATEGORY
WINNER!
Bushfire Recovery
Barbara Dawson
Medium: Film of a collection of textile artworks.
Watch Barbara’s film here
Other Details: In January 2020 fires ripped through the Shoalhaven LGA decimating native flora and fauna and their habitats. I visited the area near Tianjara in the Shoalhaven in late February and was amazed at the fire adaptive traits and regrowth of many of the natives and was inspired to recreate this journey of resilience in the medium of textiles.
My body of work, titled ‘Recovery’, consisted of a series of textile pieces created on recycled bed linen using an ecological contact print process and then embellished with stitches emulating the recovery processes and the formation of new life.
The aim of my journey was always to film my artwork in the landscape of its inspiration. This film was shot in June 2020 and edited in 2021. The textile work is ongoing.
The soundtrack is by local harpist, Moira Lawry.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
The Keeper
Jill Talbot
Medium: Acrylic, engraving and collage on birch ply
Artist’s statement: The Keeper explores the role of Custodians in preserving sacred sites protected by First Nation people for time in memoriam. Threats to these sites include logging, mining, climate change, bushfires and development. My hope is that on viewing, the audience will contemplate their role in contributing to or challenging the desecration of lands, and stand by First Nations Custodians in caring for Country.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Sometimes I can only look and wonder
Anandii
Artist Statement:
When I recently visited the carpets of pink flannel flowers as they lay across the charcoal burnt grounds of the firestorms I was amazed at these delicate little flowers and the story behind their germination – as most of us have heard now, they only grow after they have been able to germinate from the smoke from a bushfire.
What mysteries of alchemy does mother earth have tucked up her sleeve….
for me these flowers have come to represent rays of hope, when what seems to be – and was – a disaster, especially for our beloved wildlife and for the people who have been so deeply traumatised, still brings forth such beauty and delicacy.
I love contemplating that what seems to be ….
And I couldn’t help wondering what this land must have been like for the original inhabitants – the indigenous caretakers of this land – their knowledge and what they must have lived amongst, and their ability to care for the environment
Always was, always will be.
Learn from our Land
Janet Luxton
Medium: Mixed media
Artist Statement:
Explorations and experiences have given me a deep appreciation of our natural environment. Listening to Aboriginal elders over many years has deepened my appreciation and connection to this land. Dr. Miriam-Rose Ungunmeer Baumann AM talked about the gift of Dadirri (Deep Listening) when she received the Australian Senior of the Year Award. I was deeply moved. Here is the guidance to bravely look back, reconcile the past and move forward together.
Regrowth in Nature
Sabina Smith
Medium: Ceramic
Artist Statement: This ceramic sphere is slowly moulded together piece by piece using torn clay.
The torn pieces represent the past and present slowly joining together to become one. They provide stability within nature for the future.
The sphere carries the scars of its past within the crevices and cracks.
It promises strength within its solid, stable existence.
The frog gleefully warms itself upon the sun drenched well worn surface.
A snake glides silently through deep tears, grooves and hidden treasures in search of sustenance.
A lizard scuttles, hiding within the safety of the sphere.
As life returns once more to its scarred landscape, the Regrowth of Nature begins.
Corsetted and released
Judy Panucci
Medium: Mixed media:
Part A – ink drawing in specimen box Imade from recycled local cedar;
Part B – digitised repeat of drawing as wallpaper
Artist Statement: My work is based on my 97 year old mother in law, Nicolina, and her old corset.
She used to force herself into this to be on show : a specimen.
Today she laughs at such silliness. I turned the drawing into a design for wallpaper so we can smile at how far we’ve come, but remember too.
On a Special day
Denise Stevens
This piece was based on a simple photo taken of my parents in 1974 on the occasion of my sister’s graduation, an event I missed by being overseas. I have always thought it captured them at a lovely time of their lives.
They have both passed away now and it has taken me over 10 years to be emotionally ready to weave this portrait as a gift to my sister. It felt like a way of moving on while at the same time acknowledging the past.
Brown Cuckoo Doves
Helen Nugent
Other Details: This sculpture is a burial site marker in memory of my father who, severely disabled in later life, loved to feed the brown cuckoo doves which would land on his hand.
Moving forward, looking back.
Melanie Bush
Medium: Folded paper, Acrylics, Water colour, Oils, Crushed bronzing beads, Hairspray
Artist Statement:
Watching the ocean take away the past, while it simultaneously brings forth a new, bright future.
LLLL – Love, Laughter, Light & Life
Maricha Oxley
Medium: Painting using Chrome and gel ink pens on black paper.
Other Details: Size 96×60 cm, Finished February 2021
Returning to Lyrebird Country
Lea Hawkins
Medium: Charcoal pencil, coloured charcoal, graphite, coloured graphite , coloured pencil.
Artist Statement: I unexpectedly landed here in this land of Lyrebirds at the beginning of last year, not far from where I gave birth in an old cabin in the woods down the road, almost 30 years ago. During this last year bushfires indirectly causing a sudden move from a house of ten years had me living in a van very close to nature for a few months near the scene in this drawing. The ancient forest smelt like a fresh new start. I started setting up to travel in a van and make art. Enter Corona. And yet, despite the 2020 chaos I did my first ever road trip by myself, I achieved clinical remission of Crohns disease without medication defying convention and patronising doctors, faced biggest fears of moving, surgery, and face to face with a tiger snake! And by sheer chance and some super kind friends I found myself in a far better living situation in an old cabin in the woods, not far from where I gave birth almost 30 years ago, already moving forward.
Body Rites
Samantha Tannous
Medium: Felt
Artist’s Statement:Body Rites represents the woman who contains the past, present and future within her body and through her experiences. This sculpture is wet felted with Australian merino wool fibre.
So to Remember
Julie Cunningham
Medium: Digital Collage printed on silk. 800 x 600 ml. ( size of silk image) 1000 x 620 (with the frame)
Artist Statement: This was created in May of 2020, responding to the tragedy of lost wildlife in the fires.
Noni remembers the Towers
Leith Clayton-Brandt
Medium: Medium: Fabric collage and 2 photographs transmitted onto fabric stitched into linen and hand embroidered in a variety of stitches. Set onto two layers of hessian. Found objects and wire stitched onto background.
Artist’s Statement:
The art work is my imagined story of my mother’s childhood memories from 1916 to 1924. My maternal grandmother (an Irish immigrant) died in 1916, four days after the birth of her third child in Brisbane, Queensland. My grandfather’s solution for his two older children – 9 year old Noni and 5 year old Jack – was to take them north to Charters Towers, relatively close to where he worked for the Rockhampton Meat Works. There he enrolled them in Catholic boarding schools. There they remained until each turned 17 when they must seek work to keep themselves. For Noni, born with a crippled left arm, this meant returning to Brisbane, the ‘Big Smoke’, enrolling in a secretarial college so she could earn her living as a typist. All this she did, but how she missed her beloved Towers, her refuge! Each evening she sat alone on the back staircase of her boarding house, mourning for her father and brother, the kindness of the nuns from boarding school, the light and landscape of the North. She would never see Charters Towers again. This work explores her glowing memories of The Towers, the mining and beef cattle town carved from the barren isolation of inland Queensland,
Blue Wren
Catherine Mackay
Firefly – Amidst the darkness, she glows with steady hope and joy.
Olga Melnikov
Medium: Primed textile
Other Details: Based on masclasses by A. Goleneva.
BY THE RIVER
Anne Fry
Medium: Watercolour painting On Saunders 300 Gram paper Unframed
Other Details:
This painting depicts the beauty and power of the flowing river. How does it relate to the theme? One of the ways we can move forward is firstly to hopefully grasp the intersection of past, future and the present moment in silence (if we are lucky … by the river) and secondly to know that we are entrusted with the care of our natural world including waterways
Forest Meditation
Liz Skewes
Artist Statement: Thoughts and feelings on the life forces that surround and encompass us.
Coil Weaving Creations
Moira Lawry
Medium:Using coloured rope and natural plant fibres stitched together with waxed linen thread.
Coil weaving creations…the story
I began my journey at an IWD workshop with Mary Preece 2 years ago and learnt the stitching and shaping…the small one.
2. I then found the orange and black rope in a camping bag and … the basket with a lid.
3. I then thought to shape the next one into a vase….there must be more rope like this so a trip to Bunnings and found more and theblue and red one evolved.
4. What next ….and the blue and yellow pot shape evolved and later I added a lid.
5. A dish was the next obvious shape, using left over lengths of previous two shapes by stitching two ropes together as one while I worked around.
6. It was time to move forward and I returned again to the feet of the mistress and learnt more creativity with all natural fibres from the garden this time, firstly having to roll and twist dried strappy grass like leaves into “the rope” and then coiled and stitched something more ornate with little windows in the coil…..The smaller one …Windows to another place 1.
7. Then tried a similar technique with the coloured rope and a little bigger and created Windows to another place 2. I love both these shapes as they are quite tactile and sensuous.
8. Finally…another natural fibre basket with dried leaves from a red Cordyline plant.
These processes were a meditative tool during this last year of Covid and to lose one’s self
in coil and stitching help to pass time and relieve loneliness and achieve a new level of confidence. My 10yr old granddaughter Iluka even got involved and wanted to try, from scratch, with rope making first and created an all natural basket like my last one.
Rearview mirror
Venator Corvus
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Pink Ribbon
Wendy Moulstone
Medium: Mixed media-oils, proteas, barbed wire, 90x90cm
Woodstone Gallery, Falls Creek
Kingfisher
Cassie O’Carroll
Medium: Watercolour
Symphony in Colour
Cara Pacitti
Medium: Acrylic on large canvas, 83cm x 83cm
Artist Statement:
Art is a great way to express oneself. It lifts me up & has always been a great hobby of mine. Reflecting back on the past year it’s been particularly challenging for everyone during COVID-19. This artwork was composed with acrylics on a large scale canvas with rustic chunky wooden frame. It uses colours that pop & are bright, vibrant, festive & bold celebrating the happy days ahead. The frame & colours used are such opposites, that they make a statement to not be forgotten.
Earth Mother
by Ineke Veerkamp with Deb Grahame
Medium: Audio visual consisting of 3 minutes of a Cappella vocals integrated with still photographs
This work addresses the theme as it shows four generations of ini’s maternal line looking back in the timeframe of their lives and how the planet has changed during that time. ini being the last of her line, gives poignancy to the Earth’s precarious position going into the future.
Shoalhaven International Women's Day 