IMMERSED

During this current drought and change in climate, I felt compelled to examine my own relationship with water in every minute aspect. As water is such a constant, yet underestimated part of our life, I recorded my usage via a diary to gain a better understanding of how ubiquitous it is. Listing each time I drank, washed, flushed, swam, watered or observed water. This soon became overwhelming. As I became immersed in everything water, I was able to choose selected moments to capture within my artworks for this exhibition Immersed.

Continuing as a Waste Warrior, Immersed evokes my water journey as it traverses a diverse array of reused everyday vessels and consumerist waste that once housed water and their embedded narratives.

The concept that led to Immersed began whilst camping out in North West Queensland in 2014. It was extraordinarily hot and we were in the midst of serious drought. The property we have been camping at for the past 12 years had significantly changed. Not only was there less water, there were more weeds, brown dry grass, and more cow pats in the river. Following on, we returned home to Townsville where the heat and humidity combined was horrendous. We were constantly dripping and spent more time swimming or having cold showers. Then straight from that exhausting heat in November, I flew with my good friend Jill O’Sullivan to Shanghai and later Beijing to do my second artist residency with Red Gate and to a shock of adverse weather conditions, where I embarked on the first artworks for Immersed

During the Red Gate Residency I created 19 cut-out cards titled Embark from Goethe advertising cards the previous resident had left behind. The cards reflect my hot North Queensland experience: travelling over the enormous ocean to China; staying in a wet Shanghai; then the freezing Beijing residency. Each card represents a water pattern or buildings to give context to the place where I experienced these.

I brought the cards home with me where the ideas percolated further in my imagination for quite a considerable time. I decided to tell my personal water narratives through associated reused water containers and began with hot water services.

Copper is a material synonymous with water use, carrying, and heating. I divided the Embark cut-out cards into three parts for the hot water services titled Voyages. Firstly the medium-sized hot water service depicted the southern hemisphere of a tropical Australian summer in drought; secondly the small one is the voyage flying over the ocean and what was underneath us; and thirdly the large one portrays our time in the northern hemisphere commencing with a bitter Chinese winter.

I then completed a week long paper cut-out course, which informed me as to the best methods to make more creative use of two-dimensional sheet metal materials where I created River and Scrub. I drew all the cut-out images onto each of the hot water services until they formed a spiralling narrative, then plasma cut, cleaned and filed each window. Using a plasma torch to cut with is an extension of my drawing and just as free formed.

As an alternative to using water in the gallery, I use light. It is as essential and universal as water, continually seeping into our lives. Light and shadow play a powerful and luminescent aspect within Immersed particularly through Voyages, Wash and Boil

My use of materials is indiscriminate; I prefer them to have had a previous life. I also enjoy working with transparent materials like plastic or pierced metals to create windows allowing light to enter. My work often utilises multiples of one particular material, as for me personally, this is a metaphor for humans en masse and how we might behave collectively and powerfully for the better.

Plastics have been employed in Immersed. Some are immediately recognisable, such as the artworks Float, Sink-Water Bombs, Swallow and Blue Lagoon while the rings in Pour use a fraction of the Sink bottles, and are hardly recognisable.

In a car park, I got out of the car and there was a bomb shape. It had been carelessly discarded, run over and squashed: a plastic water bottle. I thought a very apt shape, as litter they bombard our waterways sinking to unseen depths. Sink – Water Bombs was born.

Individually each of these plastic artworks refers to our excessive consumerist behaviour and the impact single-use plastic water bottles have on our waterways. The works are intended to charge your creativity to reimagine better uses for these expensively produced materials.

Brew [detail] 2018

Recycled aluminium coffee pods, copper wire

41 x 91 x 83 cm

The copper and aluminium artworks, Wash and Brew, are where I fess up to my own obsessive habits involving water, my constitutional brew, and necessity for clean clothes. Wash too is created like Voyages, being drawn, plasma cut and filed out, then coloured. Brew, coffee pods are painstakingly squashed, drilled and joined with copper wire. The outer cup and saucer of Brew is a riot of colours, yet on the inside it is calm, serene and sublime, which is how I feel once I have consumed my ritual brew.

As with many of the materials I create from, I don’t use the consumables myself. I am fortunate to have a large community of people who donate their waste to me. The coffee pods have been given by friends. The colourful metallic pods, which designers create in such vibrant hues are an irresistible allure. Boil, Scrub and Drain also involve other daily rituals of cooking and washing up and the astonishing amount of water that is squandered down the drain.

The copper tubes in Course originally spiralled inside the hot water services of Voyages, and heated water. Now they mimic those undecided moments when water meets resistance and changes direction. Course is a tribute to the Flinders River, where my Immersed journey began. Its inspiring sandstone bedrock allows stone to appear fluid, carving away wavy edges and deep washing holes.

We give little regard to water which continually traverses all our lives. My hope is that you too consider how fortunate we are in Australia to have good quality water and this exhibition inspires change towards better stewardship of waste in our waterways and clean Australian water endures.

Alison McDonald

Brew [detail] 2018

Recycled aluminium coffee pods, copper wire

41 x 91 x 83 cm