03 The Battle Begins

There is a quiet struggle going on in the creeks behind the factories, in the long grass of new suburbs, within the dissection of land for commercial and residential use, it is a battle for survival over increasingly limited resources. A displacement of our native wildlife for agriculture and suburban sprawl and as the world becomes smaller, the need for a home for each of us (animal as well as human) is becoming more intensified. Left unchecked and with enough resources, populations grow to fill a space and if they continue to expand, those resources become depleted, scarce and the lives of the inhabitants come under threat.

In 2016 NorthArt Gallery held it’s annual Pocket Edition  - Small Works for large Walls exhibition. They invited 28 artists to variously paint or draw up to 10 artworks each, in oil, acrylic, pastel, pencil, gouache, watercolo

ur or ink, all on the same A6 postcard-sized Hahnemühle paper (105 x 148 mm). The content was completely open to encourage a diverse exhibition within this small structured format.

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I had just joined a local community of dedicated people trying to reduce the damage that introduced animals had made on the native fauna and flora, every few weeks going out to our designated track, checking the traps for possum and stoats and rebaiting the stations. I wanted to draw attention to the plight of the native wildlife and the battle they were having for their survival - the first works in this series were imagined armies of anthropomorphic rabbits, rats and possums, as well as native birds - all combatants in a war instigated by our ancestors. I named it the Battlelines series and as the shows continued, the military concept was expanded upon to incorporate cultural aspects of colonialism and the exploration and exploitation of ‘new’ territories utilising different genre; television, movies, portraiture and historical paintings.