Exhibition of new works on paper by Alison Worsnop

At a time when we should be frantically planting and preserving trees, it is being made easier and quicker for Pastoralists to clear land in the Northern Territory.  So this small exhibition is a quiet protest. It records some ordinary local trees: which we might casually bulldoze and burn, as if they were vermin, instead of treasuring them as cleansers of the air we breathe.  These include: a family of mangroves at Crab Claw Island Resort; Early season burn-offs on the Cox Peninsular (a fellow guest told me proudly that ‘we do this every year, to clean up the dry stuff’); a group of trees that were burned in 2018 – happily surrounded by water in La Niňa rains; Trees which I watch for birds from our front veranda (and which are regarded as a fire hazard…)

They are drawn on paper, simply with a burnt stick - charcoal - with occasional touches of earthy ochres and chalk.

As an adjunct to this exhibition, I have included a book of small watercolours. They started as abstract experiments with colour but became landscapes and creatures. Imagined and remembered places appeared. Premonitions, history, disasters, warfare, fire, habitat degradation and extinction were visualised. I decided to keep them as a personal record of 2020, an exhibition-in-a-book. Here, we were fortunate, having escaped the ravages of the Pandemic, but we have watched how it has distracted us from the much larger and more serious problems of environmental destruction and Climate Change. Our distraction has lost time and allowed insidious and opportunist exploitation to advance.