Margaret Carlin

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ARTIST'S STATEMENT

In my work I am responding to the environmental impact of a large-scake land clearings and the subsequent inability of the land to recover following natural disasters such as bushfires.

... The landscape also changes, but far more slowly; it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. This is one of the reasons that we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition; we lose not only a place, but part of ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life.. (1)

Through this exploration my concept has evolved from responding through "Regeneration" as a direct interpretation of the aftermath of bushfires on the physical landscape, to a more philosophical response of how a person regenerates a personal or emotional sense of place of belonging following an abrupt destruction of their environment.

(1) Drabble, Margaret "A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature, Thames and Hudson, London 1979, p 270