ROA WOOEE 2021
‘ Back To Nature ‘
A year of bushfire ‘recovery’, waves of lockdowns, lots of screen time and green time. The continuing challenge of a pandemic & widening calls for real action on global heating underscored 2021. A strengthened appreciation of nature & Country were experienced by many.
Keep your hiking boots on – but come inside and checkout WOOEE River of Art 2021!
WOOEE extends a warm welcome to online visitors @River of Art 2021! Walawaani!
Art walks with us in challenging times, reinvigorating our inner lives and our communities.
Opening up imagination and our ways of seeing – creativity inspires us to re-engage in the world. Fostering wholeness, repair and connection.
Katherine White – Spring Growth in Broulee
WOOEE brings together art and nature observations. Shared alongside the wisdom of Knowledge and science, offering inspiration for local solutions – and action on climate change.
In this 2021 showcase for River of Art, With Our Own Eyes Eurobdalla shares a vibrant preview of some of the many contributions we’ve received and digitised in the past year, and throughout lockdown.
WOOEE has commissioned a wonderful recording of an especially vivid performance piece created by writer, actor and broadcaster Alice Ansara, that speaks to our times.
We’re delighted to share ‘Love Letter’ with you, during River Of Art 2021! Some folk will have been lucky enough to catch Alice perform live, at Pecha Kucha#Home held earlier this year by MAP https://moreartplease.org/
Here’s Alice’s piece recorded for River of Art 2021 and for all to catch online & to re-play as many times as desired!
Need your senses to be stirred? Need some love? Turn your phone off. Take a seat.
Surrender your senses and fall into ‘Love Letter.’
Enjoy!
Ever since, we’ve been collecting what you’ve been seeing hearing, sensing and observing, as a time capsule after the fires.
Here’s paper-making artist Mandy Hillsong’s exquisite work Emerging 1, and some reflections on the process of creating works in this series.
Artist Mischi offers this poignant description of two of her stitched eco dyed textiles, made in response to Black Summer’s mega fires.
” Aftermath includes burnt leaves that rained on our deck on the 1st of January 2020. (While) Home depicts Tuross and surrounds.”
Mischi West – Aftermath
Mischi West – Home
Photograph – Michelle Hamrosi
The importance of a safer climate – and the need to value and care for our beautiful Yuin Country – is central to the WOOEE project.
Bringing art, personal stories, and nature observations together, and curating them next to deep Knowledge and science allows us to explore a range of connections and local solutions.
The need to act on cooling our climate has been amplified with the IPCC- Intergovernmental Panel Climate Control’s Code Red Report released in August 2021 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097362
Stopping global temperature rise at or below 1.5 degrees is so critcal for our present and future safety. Moving to cheaper sustainable renewable energy, ending fossil fuel use, and drawing down carbon from the atmosphere through our forests and sea kelp are the vital actions we need to take.
We know that serious damage is already occurring at only 1.1 degrees of global warming – and at 1.4 degrees across Australia’s land areas.
As we’ve witnessed, we now have more extreme fire weather days and a longer fire season. South East Australia faces more droughts with occasional floods as the IPCC Report details.
Our ocean is warming too fast, too!
Photography – Tim Burke
Local contributors have been capturing the wonder and awe of our beautiful but fragile South Coast marine worlds, also recording the effects of a fast heating and changing climate.
Beauty often points us in the direction of what’s worth valuing in our lives; offering a call to take action, to nurture and protect.
Photography – Catfish Creative
Photography – Amanda Kelby-Dunlop
A magical, long wished for experience of swimming with seals at Barunguba, Montague Island after the bushfires
Photograph – Toby Whitelaw
Glaucus Atlanticus – the tiny blue fleets that speak of larger warming patterns on the Australian Eastern Current as tropical marine life needs to moves further south.
The Humpback Whale 01 – by Catfish Creative
Shared during recent Humpback feeding events on the South Coast. The importance of whales in our ocean’s eco systems and the carbon/oxygen cycles of the planet is underlined. More ocean facts, science and inspiration aplenty at https://www.facebook.com/catfishcreative
The Traditional Owners and Custodians of Yuin Country have long been caring for Country through the practise of extensive Knowledge and deep spiritual connection, dating back over 60,000 years.
WOOEE is humbled to share – with permission – Yuwinj Dhari Bulwal, Yuin Country Explored – a beautiful short film that speaks powerfully to the foundational place of respect, and respect for Country.
See more details about the production: https://www.andrewrobinson.film/yuin
The potential – and significance – of deeper perspectives and understandings of integrated land management – such as Traditional Cultural ( Mosaic) Burning and an upcoming local Indigenous Ranger program, cannot be overstated.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=548505289903054
After the fires, and again during out LGA’s Cov-19 lockdowns, screen time was switched for green time by many in Eurobodalla. Walks and healing time time spent within nature have helped in re-finding our inner and outer sense of place.
Locals, nature watchers, first-time photographers, artists, and citizen scientists have taken to nature in greater numbers, as our Eurobodalla walking tracks and facebook and instagram feeds attest! Many of us have discovered new insights into how we spend time and resources. Or the pleasures of vegie gardening.
A page from Mark Ward’s sketch book
‘Beauty saved and found and lost again‘ – The resumed logging of native forests in Mogo’s State Forest has raised concerns about increased future fire risk, and the loss of even more precious habits, vulnerable wildlife and ecosystems following Black Summer. Deforestation and land clearing are escalating in NSW and Eurobodalla, even as global temperatures rise and our biodiversity shrinks. Image – Magella Blinksell
BioBlitz at Burrewarra Point – and perhaps yet another reminder of the precious fabric of climate, and the role it plays in supporting insect life and pollinators.
The interconnections – and feedbacks loops – between our natural world, food systems, and weather have never been more important
Julie Armstrong – Bush blossoms, heralders of joy, feeding our pollinators
Katherine White – Suburban Dreams, 2020 – an invitation to consider the interplay between our forests, villages and nearby habitats.
A series of cyanotypes made just weeks ago by artist Katherine White using plants and chemistry – and the developing process of the sun – remind us of hope and interdependence.
A pointer too, to the alchemy that can exist between science and art – and this our beautiful natural world.
curation + text
Magella Blinksell for WOOEE 2021 + 350Eurobodalla
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