Photography / “Reflection on Nature”, various artists, at the Old Barn Gallery, Pialligo, February 9-12. Reviewed by CON BOEKEL.

THIS exhibition focuses on engagement with nature through art in order to promote personal wellbeing.

The approach belongs to a rich philosophical tradition that, inter alia, drives nations to create national parks, botanic gardens and urban green spaces.

Project director, Julia Landford, stated that this NatureArt Lab project had its genesis just as covid was beginning to tighten its grip. The three-year project ended formally with more than 600 participants, who between them posted many thousands of their works on Facebook. The number of contributors continues to grow and has now topped 700.

Clearly, something significant is happening. Beyond a simple assertion, how might the exhibition demonstrate its wellbeing thesis? I must confess to a huge bias. I love being in nature. I love photographing nature. I feel complete sympathy for this project.

But the project is not a double-blind science experiment. Nothing is demonstrated statistically. Instead, the project depends on the artworks to reflect reality as the moon reflects the sun.

Fourteen thematic collages form the core of the exhibition. The collages contain the works of a subset of around a couple of dozen participants. Each theme is accompanied by thought-provoking texts. The collages vary in artistic coherence – always a challenge with so many contributors, with such a huge potential subject, and with such a mixture of media. The stand-outs in this respect are “Significant Trees” and “Water”.

The photography is almost all in the genre of natural realism. The creativity arises through the selection and combination of subjects, points of view, cropping, scale, shapes, lines, colours and textures. The selected works are almost uniformly of a very high technical quality. Most of the images reflect a wonderful intensity of seeing.

The collages are complemented by individual works. David Rees’ nature videos have steadily improved over recent years and are now excellent. The viewer enjoys usually hard-to-see crakes and rails going about their business – accompanied with beautiful mood music. Rees is branching out from birds. The thistle-feeding hawk moth sequence is superb.

The nature journals are overtly reflective and intimate – perhaps more nearly bearing directly on the project vision than the photography. Many of the drawing/text combinations are very satisfying.

There is a fundamental and inescapable irony underpinning this exhibition. Rees’ video mediates nature for the viewer. The prints and the journals are abstracted from nature. These abstractions are transposed from en plein air to the walls inside the Old Barn. The then-fresh moments-in-time are long gone.

Given these ironies, the challenge is whether the created objects can inspire fresh moments of being in the present. Are we looking at the sun or at the sun’s rays reflected on the moon? I suspect the quality of the engagement will depend to a large degree on the individual viewer.

There is a joie de vivre in this exhibition. There is a shared purpose. There are shared experiences and shared emotions. The wide-open barn doors connect the inside and the outside, the past and the present. The warm summer air flowing through the door caresses me while I enjoy the creative bounty.

“Reflections on Nature” puts the bush into the “Bush Capital”. It is a powerful testament to the Canberra community’s resilience in the face of covid.