Art @ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox: WATER GALLERY

Sunday, October 17, 2010

WATER GALLERY

Airspace Above The Dam Gouache on paper 30 x 42 cm

Water is a major issue here in Australia, and indeed all over the world. In Australia, newspapers are currently covering the release of proposals about water allocations, including supply of water to farmers in the Murray Darling food bowl. Farmers are not happy and local communities are worried that reduced allocations will mean loss of jobs and social instability.

WATCHING THE SKY
As regular readers of my BLOG know, I have long held a fascination for water, how it used, allocated, and costed. I am a farmer's daughter and also lived, for 18 years of my adult life, in Goondiwindi, a small rural town on the border of New South Wales and Queensland. As a child I watched my father stare at cloudless blue skies, and also despair when flooding rains ripped top soil away and spoiled bumper crops. Goondiwindi was the same, with farmers staring at the sky, but it was slightly different, because irrigation played a significant part of the rural experience. Cotton is a substantial crop grown in northern NSW on the border with Queensland.

RISK
Water is also an issue with the surge in coal mining, and particularly coal seam gas extraction [CSG]. Water, is a 'byproduct' of the extraction process, but under legislation this water does not come under the control of Water Resources. So, there are a number of issues now confronting communities at large, as well as those immediately affected eg: Dalby [where I grew up] and district. These issues are various, from the potential to reduce underground aquifer levels, to how to deal with the salt water byproduct, to potential contamination, to broader issues of adequate infrastructures of all kinds. The major risk, as I see it, is that lack of foresight...lack of stringent risk analysis...could lead to diminished soil and water viability, and thus the reduction of food growing capacity. I have written about risk http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2010/09/risk.html

CURRENT - CURRENCY
I have written previously about all of the things I have mentioned above. But, with water being such a current [I like to play on the word 'current'] issue I thought I'd make an online 'gallery' of some of my water paintings. This is certainly not all of them, plus I have ideas for more. I will be exhibiting some of the newer ones in my solo exhibition 'Vortex' next year 22 Feb- 6 March. After all...water disappears down a drain pipe in a vortex! But, metaphorically the turmoil, stress and strain fraught by water and its various issues, are akin to what I imagine the frantic whirling of an outer edges of a vortex to be like.

Enjoy my 'gallery'.....................................and look for the small $ signs and quotes from newspapers. The far and close distance perspectives are important reminders that we must always look and also see!