Recovery: A Blue Mountains Eco-Arts Project
Recovery: A Blue Mountains Eco-Arts Project
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, April 19th, 7 pm EDT
AEST 9 am, April 20th
As we continue to explore what it means to partner and collaborate with the natural world and each other, we will be speaking with artists from Recovery, a highly collaborative eco-arts project exploring ecology and art alongside the work of citizen scientists in response to the 'Black Summer' fires in the Blue Mountains, Australia.
The Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area is over a million hectares of diverse wilderness. Eighty percent of this area was significantly affected by the Australian 'Black Summer' fires of 2019-20. In some areas, these impacts were catastrophic, causing damage and most likely permanent loss of habitat with the decimation of species, including already threatened flora and fauna.
For Recovery, a group of passionate ecologists, citizen scientists, and artists came together over a period of ten months to investigate the effects of the fires. They looked into the trauma, deaths, and impact on flora and fauna and the remarkable processes of habitat and species recovery – through a series of workshops, collective interactions, and storytelling.
For this Kinship gathering, we will speak with curator and creative producer Justin Morrissey, poet and photographer Fiona Vaughan, and visual artist and printmaker Freedom Wilson. Together we will explore the many ways that art builds resilience and how the power of collaboration (across mediums) might prepare us to respond creatively to catastrophic climate-related events in the future. We will also be speaking with this remarkable team about their new project Swamp Diaries.
Fiona Vaughan lives in the Blue Mountains on Gundungurra and Dharug Country, where she walks, writes and makes photographs of nature, including plants, creatures (mostly the other-than-human kind) and details of landscape. Fiona has worked as a bush regenerator, audio transcriber, photographs conservator and TV subtitler. She is a member of the Blue Mountains Conservation Society Plant Study Group and the Blue Mountains Bird Observers and participates in the annual honeyeater migration counts and other bird surveys.
Freedom Wilson is a visual artist and printmaker investigating plant communities and bush habitats; their evolution, recent changes, and threats. Her prints visualize landscapes as plantscapes, studying ecological relationships at a micro-scale integral for expansive areas of natural wilderness to thrive.
Justin Morrissey is a curator and creative producer who has managed numerous productions and exhibitions including major festivals, such as Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, New South Wales, Australia. As a curator and producer, Justin encourages artists to push boundaries so they can explore their talents and the possibilities of what they can achieve with their craft. Justin is a keen environmental activist, passionate horticulturalist, gardener and permaculturalist and has an interest in social politics, land management, and Indigenous affairs.
