Let Me Take You There: the Great Artesian Basin
Let Me Take You There: the Great Artesian Basin - GAB floor map, 2021 Showing the aquifer’s contours (metres), ground water flow, springs; gas & petroleum exploration or production sites; recharge zones, cities & towns for orientation; Tropic of Capricorn; Gulf of Carpentaria.
Scale: 5000mm X 4140mm Mixed media – primed canvas, water colour, pencil, ink, crayon, acrylic paint, felt tip pen.
Map’s legend.
Detail showing recharge zones, springs, ground water flow, gas & petroleum exploration or production sites, Tropic of Capricorn, contours.
We only map locations and resources that are of use to us … my long fascination with maps has taken me to the Great Artesian Basin (GAB), a result of my field research in Central Queensland documenting the natural environments in the region of the Adani, ergo Carmichael, ergo Bravus thermal coal mine, which I then discovered is located above the GAB. Concerns that this pure underground water will be polluted by coal mining added to my initial concerns - environmental decline, carbon emissions and global warming.
The GAB is the biggest aquafer in the world, underlying around one fifth of Australia. It is a source of water from the tip of Queensland down to New South Wales, across into the Northern Territory and into South Australia. Our agriculture and livestock industries largely depend upon it.
On the field I discovered Queensland’s central and northern environments are dictated by alternating Dry Seasons in the winter when rivers dry up, followed by Wet Seasons’ massive floods in the summer. Coal mining will potentially over-extract water in Dry Seasons and pollute with coal dust the GAB’s precious water in the Wet Seasons.
Yet like myself at the time, few people are aware of the Great Artesian Basin.
Central to the installation, Let Me Take You There: the Great Artesian Basin is a desire to reveal this unique, hidden natural habitat and its precious water.
We must protect it for the future.
Great Artesian Basin artworks and installations, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2022
Great Artesian Basin map installed on the floor, with its Legend displayed on the wall, Milani Gallery Queensland. Also exhibited in the Penrith Regional Gallery, Sydney, 2022/23, in the group exhibition, ‘Undercurrents’.
The Dancers, 2022, Felt, silk, charcoal, paper, bone, plywood.
In my imagination the Great Artesian Basin map resembles a Spanish dancer - dressed in black with ragged grey veils, jewellery made of coal, one has hair made of tabs with random trivia from incontinence pads’ packaging; text on litter found on Marrickville streets reflecting our zeitgeist - ie/ rampant consumerism, bureaucratic, controlling gobble-de-gook, anonymous very personal information; one is bandaged with fabric scraps.
They are brides in mourning.
Left: soft black felt with a ragged grey veil; a coal tiara and coal belt. Right: soft black felt stretched over a plywood shape, roughly bandaged with torn scraps of black and grey silk cloth.
Left: A plywood shape covered in litter off city streets, the text reflecting our zeitgeist, culture, economy, bureaucratic blather, the intrapersonal. Right: A plywood shape covered in soft black felt with a torn silk veil concealing the skeleton of a hand; a coal tiara.
Soft black felt, stretched onto plywood, shaped an abstraction of the GAB map; ragged grey veil; charcoal tiara.
Soft black felt stretched onto plywood shaped an abstraction of the GAB map; charcoal belt; strips of paper squares from incontinence pads’ wrapping joined together like hair. The strips of paper are printed with ‘different, unusual’ trivia such as: “ODD SPOT #165: A camel can shut its nostrils in a dust storm”; “ODD SPOT #214: Most people find it impossible to lick their own elbow”; “ODD SPOT #399: In 1946, a team of six incredible women programmed the first digital computer; “ODD SPOT #97: Bees fly an average of 15 miles per hour”; ODD SPOT #7: Pearls melt in vinegar; ODD SPOT #17: Hawaii is moving towards Japan 4 inches every year.
Might this random information provide a distraction from the annoyance of incontinence as well as break the taboo?
Road Trip video, 2022
Flat screen installed with the floor map of images, text and sound from field trips during the Dry Season when rivers dry up, and the Wet Season when rivers flood, researching the natural environments in the vicinity of the Adani coal mine.
Plastikus Progressus
documenta 14, Athens School of Fine Arts Gallery, 8 April - 16 July 2017
Interior Decoration
documenta 14, Palais Bellevue, Kassel, Germany, 8 Apr - 17 Sep 2017
The sculptures are constructed from my parent’s bedroom furniture comprising a trench and watchtower, and a Vickers machine gun made from my mother’s Singer sewing machine and bobby pins. The convolution of the domestic and feminine with the military creates uncanny feelings, the Trench sensations of a return to childhood. The dado around the walls is composed of images of war and trauma, with the names of Jewish people engraved on the railway track by artist, Dr. Horst Hoheisel. His installation is titled, Das Gedächtnis der Gleise (The Memory of the Tracks), at KulturBahnhof (Kassel Central Station). Kassel’s Jewish people were deported by train from Kassel to Majdanek, Sobibor, Theresienstadt and the ghetto of Riga - no one survived.
Watchtower with Sewing Machine Gun, Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany. Watchtower is constructed from a double bed; Sewing machine Gun, constructed with bobby pins and my mother’s Singer Sewing Machine.
A second gun across the Trench with photographs of Israeli watchtowers, documented during field work following my father’s 2WW tour of duty (2nd/1st Machine Gun Battalion) through what was Palestine to Syria to fight the Vichy French.
Singer Sewing Machine commissioned by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, for the exhibition, After the War, 2019.