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November 18, 2006
I've been doing my bit for regionalism in a global world by previously mentioning the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale, which is a small peninsula of land at the bottom of our great southern continent. I've been posting some of the entrants for Fleurieu Peninsula Art Prize and some entrants in the different sections, namely The Fleurieu Peninsula Vistas Prize and the Fleurieu Peninsula Water Prize.
This is a national visual arts festival for landscape painting, which is coupled to an extensive set of events. So one way of judging the winners is to see if the landscape artists are beginning to juggle with the complexities of global warming, and if so then how.
The winner of the Fleurieu Peninsula Art Prize is:
Ken Whisson, Time Is, 2006
There is not much indication of climate change in this work, despite the reference to time and the opportunities opened up by the collage structure. It's just all too green isn't it. Pastoral almost. All's right in the rural world these days.
Yet it's not. The autumn rains have failed seven years in a row in the Murray-Darling Basin. There are no signs that this weather pattern is abating and there are signs that this is more than a drought. Our continent is getting hotter.
So the work is more about rural hopes and dreams than realities or a portrait of what once was.
The winner of the Fleurieu Peninsula Vista Prize is
Noel McKenna, Jetty, Second Valley, 2006
That's a very tranquil and peaceful image. It says that there is no need to worry or feel anxious. Yet this weekend the hot north winds are sweeping across the landscape of the Fleurieu Peninsula, the earth is parched, and the bushes and trees continue to die from lack of rain. It is not a green world anymore. It was once. Not any more.
The winner of the Fleurieu Peninsula Water prize is:
Ken Orchard, Onkaparinga Estuary, 2006
There is nothing here to suggest that we are becoming more aware of our own passage through time, or that we are facing something new wrought by climate change, or that our landscape is changing. It's a series of snapshots of a particular moment in time.
The sense of catastrophic events and climatic devastation is evoked in the winner of the Fleurieu Peninsula Youth Scholarship
Morgan Allender, When the Earth Moves: Eruption, 2006
This is a representation of a changing nature in the sense of the earth moving and its surfaces shifting from underground pressures. What is highlighted is the violence ---a tropical cyclone.
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I nominated you. I hope you beat me. I'm already famous.
http://2006.weblogawards.org/