Fresh and Salty – giant creatures return to the earth as art highlights the environment
Three giant earth platypuses are slowly dissolving back into the dry bed of Lake Wendouree in Victoria and within months, any remnants will disappear beneath water to be pumped into the lake from neighbouring Ballarat.
The ‘ephemeral’ platypuses – each 200 metres by 300 metres, and spanning in total almost one kilometre – are part of the imaginative Fresh and Salty program run by Regional Arts Victoria. Since its launch last October, Fresh and Salty has produced five major community artworks, employed 10 regional artists, engaged 20 partner organisations such as businesses, houses and local councils, involved about 90 people in a hands-on capacity and attracted audiences of up to 1,000.
The platypuses have been created using mud and sand from the lake and the designs were created by mowing and ploughing the earth, and raking the sand. The completed designs were aerially photographed and 40,000 postcards have been produced as part of a City of Ballarat promotion.
Fresh and Salty’s state-wide coordinator, Liz Duthie, says while Regional Arts Victoria’s main business is art, the crisis brought about by prolonged drought could not be ignored and Fresh and Salty was a unique way of using art to highlight the environmental problem. “This was a great way to increase public awareness about water and how precious it is. It was also a way of giving a platform to regional artists. They found the collaboration with the community and business and professional people really valuable. They also realised that there was a real difference between creating their own art, and public art,” Duthie says.
One of the five projects, an animation sequence created in the Wimmera region by artists Dave Jones and Mary and Hannah French, was incorporated into a television commercial about salinity by the local Catchment Management Authority.
And as well as the postcards, the City of Ballarat is incorporating the images of the platypuses in Lake Wendouree into entrance signs, acknowledging the area’s traditional inhabitants, the Wathaurong.
The regional arts development officer in charge of the platypus project, Verity Higgins, says the project has served to reclaim some of the area’s indigenous heritage. “There are very few descendents left of the original people of this district. The lake would have been a meeting and a hunting ground so this is a way of reconnecting with that history,” says Higgins.
The artists at the heart of the project were environmental sculptor, Michael Shiell and Indigenous artist Billy Blackall. They were helped by members of the Ballarat and District Aboriginal Cooperative Youth Group. Leading national sculptor Peter Blizzard acted as a mentor.
“Most of the work was done during January in very hot conditions and the team worked very hard over ten days turning soil, raking fairy grass, barrowing clay. It was hard yakka as the ground was spongy and uneven and it was doubly difficult because if was virtually impossible from the ground to gauge the impact of the design. There was great excitement after about day six when aerial photographs indicated that the design was working superbly.”
Billy Blackall has now been invited by the City of Ballarat to advise on the design of a new playground for children incorporating Indigenous imagery. This could well include a platypus.
Find out more at www.rav.net.au
