TO PROCESS her grief and heartache about the loss of the trees, forests and nature from the storms in Mirboo North earlier this year, emerging artist Karen Zipkas channelled her creative side.
A third-year visual arts student at Federation University, Karen is anxious about climate change and was devastated by the ruin the storms wreaked on the area and decided to base her final project on this.
Initially, she literally looked away when confronted with the destruction.
“I was just so devastated by the loss of all the trees and forests around Mirboo North. It’s my favourite area. Mark and I always go walking there, we go shopping there, we hang out at Lamezleighs, we are in Thorpdale but spend a lot of time in Mirboo North.
“I thought it just makes absolute sense to focus my work in that area and record it and it was just kind of a way of processing it and acknowledging my grief, rather than pretending; because I’d come to Mirboo North and not look at anything.”
The idea to create a camera obscura came to Karen when she was lying in bed on a hot day with the curtains closed.
“We got a little pinhole camera effect on the wall and then I thought, oh, imagine having one in the room, and then I went, imagine having one that you could drive around everywhere.”
After a short search, Karen found a box trailer, bought it, put a hole in the wall, added black-out curtains and successfully converted it into a transportable camera obscura.
“You shut the little trailer door, pull it down, and it makes a totally dark space and then the image will come through the hole in the wall.”
Karen hooked up the trailer and with her iPhone set up inside on a tripod, recorded the projected images while driving slowly past the swimming pool, the forests and the streets of Mirboo North.
“We didn’t know what we were going to get,” she admits.
“It’s got this incredible weird footage because it’s upside down (it inverts in the box). So, it’s inverted, but also colours are muted and it’s kind of fuzzy, so it looks like a blurry painting or photograph.”
Karen parked outside some of the big trees that had fallen on Dickies Hill and projected the image onto a large sheet of drawing paper inside the camera.
Initially, she was disappointed with the result as she imagined she would be able to recreate the scene perfectly.
“I shut myself in there with acrylic paints, and just tried to paint in the dark. To paint over what I was seeing and then open up the lights and see what I’ve got, and I just have sort of scrappy, abstract marks.”
Karen then took a photo of the projected scene with her phone and was amazed by the final result.
“You get these incredible images, because you get the layering of the paint and the actual original image of the embedded image, and they’re just stunning. They’re really abstract, kind of like painterly, a bit weird, like old photos, but kind of weird colours everywhere, and it’s really effective.”
Working this way, in the dark, also allowed other things to emerge.
“It kind of was all about me just sitting there (in the dark) and acknowledging that all these trees are being destroyed and it’s really sad, and it just helped me process it by painting it,” explains Karen.
“And it’s okay, because I was more interested in capturing the moment rather than a perfect picture.
“It’s been really healing.”
Karen’s artwork, including drawings, paintings, photos and videos will be on display, together with her camera obscura so people can go in and do their own drawings if they want to.
The exhibition opening will be held on Wednesday, November 13, 5pm, at the Switchback Gallery, Federation University, Churchill.
