HOMEGROUND

Between Nature and Industry lies Art[1]

 My first encounter with Wallerawang Power Station was in 1985 when my friend, curator and writer, Peter Haynes and I were driving to Orange Regional Gallery for the opening of Heartland, a touring exhibition curated by Julie Ewington. Peter was opening the show and I was giving an artist talk. We had my children, Alexander and Laura Boynes with us. We stopped, somewhat quickly by the side of the road, as Alexander was ill, for the inevitable nappy change and there in the distance as I looked up from a messier occupation was Wallerawang. I quickly made a sketch, part of the ephemera travelling with this current exhibition 20 years later! After quickly breast feeding Laura, I must have made the topical landscape sketches on the same page, more probably it was while I was feeding! Also with that ephemera is the record of the work Between Landscape and Industry lies Art that I painted in due course and which was purchased by the iconic art historian and writer Bernard Smith. His droll letter and a wonderful little ditty, puns, for the first time but not the last, about my doppleganger, John Martin, the romantic, apocalyptic British artist.

I returned to the Central West in 1995 to visit Guy Fitzhardinge, who I had commissioned for a lowly sum, as an environmental consultant, for my first of 10 subsequent collaborative environmental art projects. It was Tracts: Back o’ Bourke. One of the paintings from this project is in the Bathurst Regional Gallery as T.J. Mitchell travelled through the Central West of NSW.  Guy took me to view a study for the keynote work I was using as a reference for the Tracts; Back O’ Bourke project, a study for W.C. Piguenit’s Flood on the Darling. In addition, his first bit of environmental advice, was “come and live with me”. Happily our marriage and partnership in art and environmental projects continues, as does our enduring passion for the Piguenit painting. 

I have painted well over 200 works in the Central West, so the 20 chosen for this exhibition reflect those 20 years in a landscape which has slowly opened up to me. I regard it as privilege to have lived here for this long chapter of my life and am at ease with the space, the solitude, whole weeks that pass with only the dogs, chooks, birds and above all the views overarched by wonderful skies. 

Nature has not turned out to be as I would expect however, I have a deep unease about the landscape we live in. I see it becoming becoming marginal as climate change accelerates. The issues of water I have addressed in many environmental art projects are tantamount. While I thought it was serendipity to find myself living next to the biggest gold mine in the southern hemisphere, indeed leasing land from them, that too bears heavily on our minds, just as fossil fuel and coal seam gas bear on farmers just a few valleys away.

20 years later, after our first roadside stop at Wallerawang, I present 2 recent collaborative works with my son Alexander, an artist and curator in his own right now and the issues we are dealing with are still consistent with Eisenstein’s paraphrase, Between Nature and Industry lies Art.  

Mandy Martin July 2016

[1] Paraphrase of Segei Eistenstein, Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, 1899-1948