BASS Coast artist Valmai Todd was moved to create from the destruction caused by climate change she has personally experienced.
“I am an environmentalist and have been for a long time, and I was very upset by the massive bushfires that went through the mountains in NSW and into Victoria in the ‘19, ‘20 bushfires.
“I love the bush and just the fact that I was thinking about all the animals, creatures that were being destroyed by the voracity of the fires. Where the fires burnt to the sea, that upset me because it is like there is no escape for the animals.
“I returned to an area that had been devasted by the bushfires about nine months later and what hit me was that the dense green bush was reduced to just a lattice of charred branches.
“Browns and blacks were the main bush pallet, and the area was silent, absolutely silent, no birds, no insects, no lace monitors and snakes. It was, it was quite tragic really.” The devastation to the usually vibrant landscape was confronting to Valmai, and she thought to express conflicting feelings of both sadness and optimism thorough her artwork.
“I had produced two lino prints based on that. One is called Survival and the other is Hope. One of them was the hope, because the gumtrees have got this beautiful survival mechanism, where they grow an epicormic of leaves out of the trunk as a bid to survive, and there was evidence of that, and there was evidence of little seedlings trying to grow from the ground having been exposed to the heat, particularly with the banksias, they propagate that way.
“So, there was this freshness along the ground that nature was trying desperately to survive, and that gave me the hope.”
Valmai has long been an artist and worked as an art teacher before retiring. She has dabbled in drawing and painting and other art forms but became serous about printmaking about eight years ago. She was drawn to the careful meticulousness of the printmaking process, and now works with her own press in her studio.
“I went to a workshop in early 2015, with master printmaker Jazmina Cininas and I learned a good way to do registration, because that’s the key to colour reduction, to be able to lay your work in exactly the same position so the next layer of colour is exactly the same.” “It’s a challenge. I enjoy the challenge through establishing a marking point so I can get a reference print for each layer of colour. I develop an image usually about eight to ten colours now, usually finishing off with black. The whole process usually takes me about two months.”
Through her works Valmai contributes to the climate change conversation and the uncertainty around the future of our world. The two lino prints, Survival and Hope, will be exhibited at the ArtSpace Gallery in Wonthaggi for their Winter Solstice Exhibition with the theme, Uncertainty. “Climate change is huge and the situations of our weather systems are massive, fire storms flooding, earthquakes. Humans have to say we’re responsible for this and we have to act, we have to act now.” A wood carving will also be exhibited by Valmai, representing the same tension around the future. The carving was created with material Valmai sources from England, lemon wood, dense enough for detailed carvings and which depicts a distorted sized frog sitting in a rubbish tip. “It is a little wood engraving, quite tiny and quite detailed, and that’s based on endangered species of frogs. Frogs are our indicator of healthy waterways, and in particular the Baw Baw frog, which reaches down into South Gippsland from the central areas. I’ve called it knee deep because the frog is knee deep in our pollution and if you say knee-deep you’ve got the frog sound. That was a feeling of fun with a twist of reality. That’s the evidence of humans on the planet; is wiping out the wildlife and upsetting the delicate balance of the eco systems.”
Valmai hopes her work will provide a thought provoking, stimulating representation on the current climate change crises and that it will inspire the viewer to contemplate and consider the impact that humans are having on the earth. “I think it’s important to, from an artist’s point of view to demonstrate our feelings. That’s our way. Artists have got that visual ability to do that for the viewers, where (that old saying) a picture says more than a thousand words. Quite often people switch off from reading massive paragraphs, but at a glance, I’m hoping they will pick up a message.” The exhibition opened to the public from Tuesday, May 30 until Sunday, June 25 at ArtSpace, Wonthaggi.
