Artist Statement:

This is an amazing landscape with so much biodiversity and visual diversity. Originally Calperum was mapped out as a sheep station some 135 years ago and covers an area of 242800 hectares. In a relatively short period of time settlers cleared the landscape of its Mallee timber and denuded and compacted the soil by overstocking with sheep. You could say Calperum now is a phoenix rising from the ashes as it regenerates towards how it might have been before white settlement. Now as part of the Biosphere project the landscape is a haven for native plants and animals with an abundance of bird habitat and stands of highly endangered Mallee scrub.

Situated close to the Murray river near Renmark, South Australia this landscape offered a rich and diverse palette to me as an artist. Gypsum and salt lakes, clay pans and billabongs, sand hills and mud flats held evidence of the marks of animals and birds creating a pulse and rhythm of life. The marks of the settler are slowly being removed from this landscape.

Walking through it, I saw evidence of buildings and fences which have long since decayed, introduced plants which have become weeds are now being crowded out by thriving native species. The introductions to the landscape now are those of the conservationist. Coloured water tanks perched on rises to gravity feed seedlings through a maze of poly pipe or mesh cylinders carefully pegged around seedlings on the mud flats to protect them from emu and kangaroo.

This landscape allowed me to work with temporality - a bird print in fast drying mud or a leaf falling form a tree as well as more enduring passages of time like the slow decay of human lives evidenced through broken fence lines and discarded dwellings. The landscape is still full of people, scientists, conservationists, indigenous rangers, artists etc but the visitors and inhabitants today see Calperum as part of the lungs of the world rather than an industry.

Image: © Wendy Teakel, Catherine Asquith Gallery