Brackish Waters at Twenty-Six Constable street
Tara Luty, Chloe Mason, Jess Swney, and Zara Cook
Brackish Water is a body of both salt and freshwater. This term illustrates the site-responsive nature of the selected works to various landscapes, such as wetlands, the intertidal zone and coastal erosion landforms. Each artist employs multi-disciplinary techniques to amplify the landscape’s voice, and through artistic explorations of kinship, they acknowledge their entanglement with non-humans through active site-specific research.
Through this exhibition, the artists will be sharing their intimate relationships with water ecologies within an art-making context, drawing from new materialist and ecofeminist concepts. The exhibition aims to link artmaking to practices of care, to decentralize the human, and to consider the materiality of their mediums.
I have been looking into the crafts movement in relation to connection with people and place. Crafts is something I love and grew up doing. This has made me dive deeper into connections made through crafts and the links I have with crafts in the Coromandel. I continue to want to make sustainably and to advocate by showing the beauties of the Coromandel environment, even amongst its devastation . The imagery for this piece was originally sourced after I took a walk after a storm and found natural forms and shapes made from the washed up drift wood. I use off cuts and discarded materials to minimise waste in these pieces.
After Making the work Dune I realised I was finding it tough to be looking through a destructive lens of our environment when making. I decided I wanted to give the advocacy for the environment through appreciation of the place even after storms and natural/manmade mistakes made to our shorelines. I have started to do this by using photographs from the peak of the storms and destructions made at the beaches but focusing on their integral shapes and forms made.
Exploring connections to my female lineage has inspired my interdisciplinary practice traversing textile and craft. It pushed an exploration into my relationships with people and place to create works which are made in kinship with our environment. I have developed these learnt techniques of craft to form my own practice to use sustainable materials to celebrate the beauties of our environment across the coromandel shorelines.