Over Head

As we contemplate the power of art in a time of accelerating climate events, come hover your eyes over Jess Higgins’ large art works

The artist’s Over Head series offers a unique visual testimony to the efforts of fire fighters, and a way of capturing the scale of Black Summer.

WOOEE speaks with Jess Higgins

Tuross-grown artist and print maker  Jess Higgins  says summer 2019 – 2020 was  a season that will  forever stay imprinted on her life.

“ I was (living) at the  coast  in the lead up to the fires. I left to come back to Canberra – where I’m now based, travelling up the Brown Mountain on the 30^thof December 2019 as ash began to fall from the sky. ” says Jess.

“I had stopped to visit my family in Bodalla on my way home.

“By the time I had driven up the mountain and arrived in Cooma a fire had started in Bemboka.” Jess recalls, from her studio.

“I remember driving, feeling the heat, seeing how dry the land was.”

Over Head encapsulated the artist’s own  personal grappling with the unfathomable scale of the 2019-2020 fires. Yet the works also embody an even larger and shared collective experience; felt throughout Eurobodalla’s community and around the nation.

To me it was a symbol for the season, the fact that some of the fires were so hard to access via the ground that attacking from the air was the only way.   

Jess Higgins

“The first time I drove down the Clyde after the fires was the 25^th of January. I didn’t drive by myself I knew it would be extremely emotional and confronting and I wasn’t wrong.

I felt extreme sadness, my heart was broken for the land, the animals, the community and the service people who tried to save and do all that they could.”



“I was seeing the landscape in a way I never had before and hopefully never will. I feel like I couldn’t understand how big these fires actually were. – it’s different seeing the fire spread on the Fires Near Me App – until I was driving to Tuross down the Princess Highway I couldn’t have anticipated how far reaching the damage was.”  



I had to make these works about what had happened to my home, my family and friends.

The process of making these works was healing for me as I hope it was in a small way for my close friends and family as we all felt these things together.”  

Over Head brings together relief cut prints and works drawn with charcoal.

The evocatively textured silhouette of a helicopters offers a charged symbolism, also captured in the series’ enigmatic title. Drawings of water bombing aircraft are all the more potent for being worked in charcoal collected from Jess’ family home, as well as from One Tree Beach Tuross Head, Potato Point and Nerrigundah.

“It has a layered meaning.” says Jess when asked about her choice of Over Head as a title.

“ But for me it was in reference to the aircraft that seemed to be a constant throughout.

“I have some memories of even hearing the helicopters in the background while I was talking to my mum on the phone when I could get through to them, and seeing the helicopters flying over the fire at Braidwood weeks and weeks before the fires at the South Coast.” Jess recalls.

” The helicopters and water carrying aircraft worked such long, long hour’s just dropping water on the fires all day…”

“To me it was a symbol for the season, the fact that some of the fires were so hard to access via the ground that attacking from the air was the only way.” 

Timing

“I think the timing of the exhibition … was important as I knew we were now dealing with a pandemic. I wanted to show that I have not forgotten about my community, my home and what they experienced.” 

One month after  her solo exhibition of Over Head in August, at M16 art space in Canberra, Jess generously  allowed With Our Own Eyes Eurobodalla to display prints of her works back home on Walbunga Country, on Vulcan street.

Here, in a community arts context – in the windows of Rustic Pantry @The PantryMoruya on Moruya’s main street, they struck a chord with many local bushfire survivors. They were displayed with other community and art works in WOOEE’s ‘window gallery’ for Walk the Street, River of Art 2020.

Just six months out from the fires, and as the world’s media attention shifted from Australia’s worst wild fires to a burgeoning pandemic, Over Head offered a means of chronicling, processing and healing. And saying the fires were not forgotten.

Now two years on from Black Summer, they memorialise the bravery of fire fighters, and the experiences of our community. Beautifully wrought, they remind us to keep the safety and protection of our community in our hearts and ongoing actions.

https://jessalicehiggins.weebly.com/2020-over-head.html

 https://www.beagleweekly.com.au/post/with-our-own-eyes

“She explores the sense of sacredness the charcoal holds and the importance of the materials used is reflective of the particular moment in time. “ from Over Head Artist Statement
https://jessalicehiggins.weebly.com/2020-over-head.html

photos of installation – solo exhibition Over Head, M16 art space 2020

https://jessalicehiggins.weebly.com/2020-over-head.html

Looking Ahead

“We need to adapt to a changing climate, it doesn’t take a scientist to see the increasingly more severe weather, ” Jess sums up.

We need to re-assess how we manage the land and listen to First Nations people on how to do so. ”

” We live on Yuin country, and we need to listen and learn from its custodians, the best ways to manage the land.” says Jess

We have a lived experience and perspective on the urgency of cooling our planet and caring for Country.

And we’ve seen – from above and below – the long term costs of not acting strongly.

Our work to protect our community, and beautiful Eurobodalla, Yuin Country, continues.

Art offers a unique way of encapsulating the types of

experiences that often feel too large,

too epic or too hugely visceral or overwhelming to portray

through everyday means of communication.

Where successful, in just one drawing or rendering, the experiences of the artist and

a community

can be held and shared…

With Our Own Eyes Eurobodalla

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” New years eve 2019, whilst staying at Riverside Park in Moruya, these two water bombers were flying circuits of about 10 minutes each. On each pass, they collected 3 tonnes of water a time in their floats. They kept this operation up for about 4 hours, and we reckoned they were water bombing Mogo. Such amazing skill and perserverance.” Fran & Derek Anderson, Broulee.

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Jess Higgins is an emerging artist who is now based in the Canberra region. Her practice primarily encompasses print media and drawing techniques. Conceptually Jess’ works are based on the on-going loss of human life at the hands of unethical practices of war. Jess depicts uncompromising imagery using the human body as a vehicle to explore physical and psychological states of trauma. 

Conceptually, the labor-intensive mark making process through Jess’ woodcarvings and the materiality of the works have become integral to her practice.   

Experimenting with the scale and composition of the works, she explores the various ways in which the viewer engages with the works. The fragility of the materials used are in stark contrast to the expressive mark making used to render these figures taking something that is momentary or completely unseen and creating an image that is immersive for both herself and she hopes, the viewer. 

http://Instagram – @jess.higgins.art

https://www.picuki.com/profile/jess.higgins.ar

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Photographic prints of of Jess Higgins works were displayed in a shop window display during River of Art, and WOOEE’s ‘Art on Parade’ in Spring 2020

see more here –

The nature of it

With Our Own Eyes