Hold on, It's Impossible

After two years of living in one of Britain's rainiest cities, I moved to Mildura, a semi-arid agricultural community which was experiencing its tenth year of drought. The cloud (and the rain that comes with it), which had been a much loathed part of daily life in the UK, became something everyone was longing for, a sign of hope.

Hold On, It's Impossible,

Bobbin lace, cotton and silver thread,

linen and metallic thread (bobbin lace) (Mildura), paper-cut, ink

2010

First exhibited in an urban subway at the end of 2010, Hold On, It's Impossible depicts a heroine determined to bring a cloud to the 'food bowl' by pulling on streams of rain. Over the two month period of the exhibition, Mildura received more than ten times the rainfall that it did at the same time the previous year. Drought became flood, the cloud no longer a sign of hope, and the 'heroine' now appears to be a solitary figure struggling to drag her baggage.



Hold On, It's Impossible, 2010
(detail)

The benefit of hindsight

"Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, easily spurn the significance of their predecessors' activities and lament the consequences" (William J Lines, Taming the Great South Land, 1991).

The dead tree, which is central to the piece, connects - through its root system - fragmented images of native bush with images of contemporary commodities, drawing a link between the many texts which describe the heroic pioneering of the land and environmental texts condemning these practices.

How will future generations view our current lifestyles, in which the commodities we use and readily discard mark our identity, yet have as destructive yet overlooked impact on the natural environment as the unsustainable practices of our predecessors?

Cloth, thread, paper, and pen.

22 x 32cm