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| Helen Martin, Sea/Cloud Horizon - Robe, 2016, oil and beeswax on linen, 90 x 120cm |
The Cloud Horizon
In this body of work - The Cloud
Horizon - I want to refocus our
attention on the clouds we find in our natural world; to reclaim them from the digital
world where ‘the cloud’ is a place we store ‘packets of data’ in energy hungry
mainframes many thousands of kilometres from our homes.
The horizon is central to these paintings – that imaginary line that
depicts the boundary between different physical states: land and sky; sea and
sky; land and cloud; and when seen from above, cloud and cloud. The horizon can also be a standard we set for
ourselves, something we are always travelling towards, but not able to quite reach.
More ominously, the horizon can represent a limit – a point of no return
- that once reached, pulls us into a vortex of destruction. The Cloud Horizon for me is a way to ponder what
will become of clouds when we reach the point of no return with climate change.
I started this work after a road trip to Robe in South Australia in late
autumn 2014 and finished it after another road trip in 2015, around the same
time of year, from Perth to Broome via Karijini National Park in Western
Australia. On both trips we spent some
time travelling through soft, cloudy rainy days. The clouds seemed to be hugging the
horizon. They were comforting clouds. the
stratus clouds that form when warm air rolls in over cooler ground, forcing the
moisture in them to condense, and depending on the temperature, to fall as rain
or hail or snow or mist.
These are the clouds that we look for on the horizon when we are waiting
for rain, and are happy to see them.
I wonder what will become of these clouds as we travel rapidly and unpredictably
towards the climate change horizon. Will
we long to see them and the life giving water they bring, and will we also dread
them as they hang around for days releasing a deluge of destruction?
Helen
Martin
April 2016 |
| Helen Martin, Night Cloud - Point Lonsdale, 2016, oil and beeswax on linen, 57 x 46cm |
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| Helen Martin, Land/Cloud Horizon - Leaving Karijini I, 2016, oil and beeswax on linen, 51 x 76cm |
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| Helen Martin, Land Cloud Horizon - Heading West on the B140 IV, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 60cm |
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| Helen Martin, Cloud/Cloud Horizon, 2016, Oil and Beeswax on linen, 120 x 90cm |
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