Neil Fettling: Here’s MUD in your eye
A selected series of paintings based on the Mallee and its ecological sustainability, viewed through the region’s boinkas (salt-pan or shallow groundwater depressions) that, occasionally brim with water, ‘but generally (are) dry and glittered with salt rime and edged with gypsum shards and muddy sand’ (Carter, 2010, 71).
The boinkas are largely the result of remnant surfical salt crusting from an ancient inland sea, but more recent clearing of adapted indigenous flora, (Eucalyptus Dumosa, pines and casuarinas, heath, saltbush and spinifex), for dryland cropping, grazing, rabbit and mice plagues and the gradual incursions of irrigated horticulture, have seen these ubiquitous environments undergo further stress.
This new work builds on earlier painting-based exhibitions, Of tracks and traces: works of Fletchers Lake, 1989 and The sum of all elements and the existence of the whole, more works of Fletchers Lake, 1993, (please see website: http://NeilFettling.com.au) where the earth’s skin and biota reveal the cycles of inscribed human impact in conjunction with the scars inflicted by the forces of nature itself.
All references to life sustaining water, however oblique, are gone and the primal mud has turned to apocalyptic sludge. The scarified surfaces are etched and incised, wounds that seep from fissures beneath the skin or just openly bleed. In these works we are reminded of the remnants (either human, animal or vegetable) of life in our threatened natural world.