Fires and floods and climate change

New work - What the Sea Leaves (detail)

This week has been all about the fires sweeping through New South Wales and Queensland.

There seems to be no escaping climate change for it is everywhere. We left our farm in Victoria 10 years ago to come north to the semi tropics where there was plenty of rain and water. Victoria had been in the grip of a 10 year drought and we escaped before the big bushfires came within 2 kilometres of our mud brick and timber home.

Now the fires sweep all around us. Even at the beach there is evidence of the catastrophe. Soot and burnt leaves litter the the tideline. At first I thought it was the sea weed so dark upon the sand. Looking closer I saw burnt eucalyptus leaves and blackened sticks.

I returned with a bag and starting collecting them because I thought it could be embedded into paper. The next day it was gone so I was so glad I had retrieved this evidence. A bit like collecting all the seagrass from the erosion and king tides we were having before I left for Iceland.

I wanted to talk about the seas that connect us all, Australia to Iceland, bushfires to melting glaciers and floods. I had some fishing net hanging up we had dragged from the beach several years earlier and hung up in the patio. The black nylon that had been used to patch and mend the net was perfect for my experiment.

I embedded pulp made from torn up paper which survived the 2017 floods in Murwillumbah, added the burnt leaves and soot and embedded it into the netting. It has started a whole new approach to making a new body of work about climate change.

What the sea leaves …inspiration and source material