Visual Arts / Staying with the Trouble – Regeneration. Grainger Gallery, Fyshwick,until May 3. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS.

In this exhibition the artists Linda Dening, Kim Mahood, Sally Simpson and Wendy Teakel continue their deep interest in the need for regeneration and care of the landscape.  

Farmer Gill Sandbrook invited the four artists to spend a week on her regenerative farm at Bibbaringa, Bowna in NSW. Artist residencies are part of Sandbrook’s continuing project to involve artists in understanding the regenerative processes involved in farming and protecting the land, hopefully inspiring them to be creatively involved through their work.

Linda Dening’s large charcoal and dry pastel drawings are full of the life force. It pulsates through her strong and intricate linear drawings of the vigorous root systems of the native grasses in the work Kangaroo. In another work called Pulse she charts the spreading resilience of roots of a very old Kurrajong tree on the property – once part of a vanished forest.

Kim Mahood has chosen to use pastel oils to portray in heightened colour the renewed fecundity of the rolling pastures and the replanted trees in a series of works called Patchwork 3 and 4.  In another work, Shimmer, the bird’s eye view of these paddocks is bounded by the distant hills that give the landscape an almost magical reality.

Some of Sally Simpson’s calligraphic-like works in charcoal (Shadow and Substance) appear to unfold like scrolls charting the deep crevices of rocks and secret sources of the water that forms the natural water courses on the farm. The human presence as part of this landscape is suggested in the work Flow by the image of Gill the farmer and in the work Frequency by the long shadows of figures cast on the grass.

Wendy Teakel’s layered drawings of trees in the landscape are overlaid with burnt poker work and applied textures. The seemingly random placement of black lines across the canvas suggests how at Bibbaringa the paddocks follow the water lines and the curve of the hills to nurture the land’s sustainability.

This exhibition at Grainger Gallery demonstrates a deep and passionate feeling for the landscape by four artists that are able to communicate this response through these sensitive and poetic works. It is an exhibition that also has a backstory we would be wise to heed.

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