Their Future in our Hands by Claire Baker. Photos: Jan Pittard.
The HR Gallop Gallery, an exhibition space tucked within AgriPark buildings on the Charles Sturt University Wagga Wagga campus, is currently hosting Not on my Watch.
This exhibition features graphic, installation, mixed-media and audiovisual works by researchers, academics and artists from regional and metropolitan areas of Australia, created in response to environmental challenges in their districts.
The works are thoughtful, hugely varied and often poignantly beautiful. The eye-catching centrepiece is a potted dead tree with Leanne Wick’s 15 knitted Regent Honeyeaters, including two juveniles in a nest. These birds, which make their home in Carpertee Valley, NSW, are classified as endangered because land clearing and climate change have adversely impacted their habitats.
Jenni Munday and Lynette Callaghan have focused on two turtle species whose future is at risk from nest predation by foxes and human incursion into the environments where they have formerly flourished.
Callaghan’s images look deceptively decorative until you realise the motifs they employ are human footprints and remnants of ravaged nests. Munday’s murky and mysterious cyanotype prints with their embroidered details suggest the uncertainty of the broad-shelled turtles’ future.
Turtles All The Way Down by Jenni Munday.
Banksia scrub habitat is the chosen subject of Ruth McDermott’s video, while Toni Hassan depicts her concerns for the fate of grey-headed flying foxes in a complex, large-scale graphic work titled Interconnected.
These are just a few of the revelatory works included in Not on my Watch. The exhibition is both informative and a call to action. It will culminate in a symposium on 30 March onsite in Room 251, Darnell-Smith Dr, CSU Wagga campus, with streaming online.
Speakers include ecologist Professor Dave Watson and sustainability expert Ed Mar. You can register for the symposium by emailing Jenni Munday at [email protected].
Not on My Watch is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10 am to 3:30 pm until 31 March at the HR Gallop Gallery, Darnell-Smith Drive, CSU campus.
