Place and landscape ground us, orientating our worlds and shaping our affective connections. For many communities, attachment to land and place was a core feature of spiritual and cultural identity; almost all communities recognise particular features of the environment as ‘sacred’, whether they refer to it in religious or scientific terms. Disruptions to landscape or to people’s relationship to land are highly contested, often unsettling. Artwork, text, and stories have given space to articulate, share and seek redress in a changing environment.
Arthur Boyd
Arthur Boyd is an Australian artist, part of the well-known Boyd family of artists. Brother to David Boyd, fellow artist and creator of ‘Buckley Reclaimed’, Arthur’s portfolio includes a number of artworks that focused on environmental impact. Boyd used his public platform to create artworks focusing on environmental change and connection. His artwork, ‘Eroded Creek Bed‘, was considered a major purchase when it was acquired as part of the Universities collection.1 Although it was never controversial, it engages in social comment, recording environmental damage. In 1993, Arthur and his wife, Yvonne, gifted their property, Bundanon, to the Australian public. This bequest was enhanced by subsequent acts of private generosity and government support, creating the cultural institution for artistic enjoyment and learning that thrives today in the Shoalhaven.2
View more of Arthur Boyd’s works at the Art Gallery NSW website and more about Bundanon here.
Judith Wright: Conservationist & Aboriginal Rights Campaigner
http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-526714378
Australian poet Judith Wright shared her deep connection to the environment through the words she expressed. Bringing attention to a number of environmental issues threatening some of Australia’s most well known locations, such as the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island, she formed the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. Wright was also a supporter and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights.
Hans Heysen: A Reverence for Nature
Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1877 and migrated to Adelaide in 1884, Hans Heysen is regarded as one of Australia’s greatest artists. He had an immense love for the natural environment, was an ardent conservationist, and was intensely proud of his adopted country.3
Heysen was a conservationist far ahead of his time. He fought to preserve the flora of the Adelaide Hills—particularly the great red gums and white gums—and repeatedly warned of the dangers of destroying the natural environment. He also recorded the human activities of the region in great detail. In this he has been compared with the Barbizon painters of France for his deep understanding of simple labour in the fields. No other Australian artist has preserved a regional way of life so fully and faithfully. He was not a religious man, but he had a pantheistic reverence for Nature.
View Hans Heysen – Country Road, 1920
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (c.1595-96), places its comedic action within a forest, where humans mingled with fairies, and drama ensues. The forest played an important role in early modern story-telling; it was a site of ambivalence and portent, where moral choices were laid out, decisions made, and the futures that unfolded from them activated. Landscapes and environments have long inspired the imagination, given shape to our lives, and enabled uncertain settlings.
https://archive.org/details/midsummernightsd00shak
Nici Cumpston
Nici Cumpston is an Adelaide based photographic artist and curator with Afghan, English, Irish and Barkindji Aboriginal heritage. Her practice focuses on creating awareness of places that were and still are important by showing past occupation by Aboriginal people. As Cumpston says, “people can have cultural obligations to many locations over great distances so it is imperative that they have a deep understanding of how to survive. There are subtle signs in the landscape that inform varying clan groups of food and water sources. These signs are vital to survival in this county of extreme temperatures and vast distances between obvious fresh water supplies.”
Cumpston’s works are held in a number of collections around Australia including at the University of Adelaide.
View Nici Cumpston on the National Gallery of Victoria website.
View Nici Cumpston on the Museum of Australian Photography website.
Histories of Emotion 