Influences
Janet Laurence & John Wolseley
“Working with living plants you become very aware of their being, their needs and internal processes.”
(Janet Laurence, Art and Australia, Spring 2010, p.64)
Janet Laurence's environmental and ecological artworks express her intentions not only to encourage the audience to further explore her artworks, but also to create the interconnection of life forms, relationship to natural natural world. I too create artworks that visualises the wonders of the unseen natural world.
Laurence's one of works, Veil of Trees, 2015 is the artwork that inspired me the most to reveal the hidden side of the nature in my art. In Veil of Trees, Janet used glass panels to create transparency in her artworks and placed them in nature. Some of the glass panels were engraved with quotations taken from various poems and essays by Australian authors, musing on the life of trees. (J, Taylor, 2000)
She was my mentor artist during the development of 'Invisible Forces' and I created transparency by drawing realistic sketches of mushrooms and marks which allows the audience to explore the nature.
Veil of Trees (1999), 100 red forest gums, 21 glass panels – laminated and enclosing seeds and ash with Australian poetry, Corten-steel panels containing LED lighting
“The landscape in tree form imprints itself on the paper. The themes of the whole exhibition are encapsulated here, and are part of the larger human dilemma – do we humans listen to and move with the rhythms and dance of the earth and the cosmos, or do we separate ourselves from it and impose structures and systems to contain and control it.” (John Wolseley, 2015)
As an artist and conservationist, John Wolseley attempts to reconnect humanity with its environment in a metaphorical way. He says his art “collaborates with nature” to achieve these ends. (Wild, 2015)
John Wolseley, Heartland and Headwaters (2015)
Murray-Sunset refugia with 14 ventifacts (2008–10) and Flight of ventifacts, Mallee (2006–12)
carbonized wood, watercolour and graphite on 15 sheets of paper, 120 x 232 cm
John Wolseley has always been a mentor artist of mine. His unique technique of 'collaborating' with nature inspired me to take spore prints from mushrooms and mono-prints of natural elements onto my drawing. I also grew mushrooms during the process to observe various forms of mushrooms and researched scientific diagrams of their parts and stages of growth. These unique marks and patterns of natural organisms in my artworks show how natural elements are formed and shaped and enhance a sense of reality within realistic sketches of fungi in Invisible Forces. My second installation, Invisible Forces II was also developed from fungi I grew on sheets of paper. I got an idea of growing fungi on papers from one of Wolseley's works, Heartland and Headwaters.
The Heartlands and Headwaters series found a focal point in landscape sites spread throughout Australia, where Wolseley sought to unite the big dynamic forms of the land, like the movement of the mountains and sand dunes, with the minutiae of natural forms, including the details of the habitats of birds, insects and plants. (Grishin, 2015) Wolseley subverts traditional approaches to the depiction of landscape and seeking to give the natural world a more active presence in the work of art. (NGV, 2015) In Heartland and Headwaters, he collaborates with nature and decided to use natural elements as the medium. He let large sheets of paper across the charred remains of burnt tree trunks and branches.