A new exhibition by Apple Tree Creek-based artist Cate Verney shares the hidden beauty of the Wallum heathland and celebrates its resilience and cycles of recovery following fire.
Opening at Childers Arts Space on Saturday 22 February, It Hangs By a Delicate Thread reflects on the nature of damage, repair and balance in the coastal scrubland.
Cate said her interest in the Wallum began with cicadas and developed while completing her arts degree and creating artworks for the Wildflowering by Design exhibition in 2021.
“Most people drive past the Wallum before they get to the beach and they go, what is this scrubby, ugly, dry, miserable looking ground, and I would do exactly that,” Cate said.
“However, inside the Wallum is just magic; there’s flowers, there’s creatures, there’s leaves.”
Much of Cate’s work is made from natural fibres and incorporates found objects she has gathered from the Wallum.
Cate said her work reflects on the capacity for nature to heal itself through cycles.
“After the big fire at Walkers Point in 19/20, I became extremely anxious about living out here, and how close the fires came.
“They probably weren’t, but in my imagination, they were way too close for me.
“I started to investigate trauma and repair, damage repair, and then finally, after a few years of thinking about it and working my way through it, the balance that comes at the end.”
Included in the exhibitions are clay forms that Cate said were inspired by ant hills found in the Wallum rest area between Childers and Bundaberg.
“I wanted to tell the story of the Wallum through the clay forms, I wanted somehow for the clay to have the damage and the repair shown through them,” Cate said.
“The cracks are a lot like the Japanese technique, where they fill the gold in the repair, where the repair becomes more important than the original.
“I’ve mixed the ash that I’ve taken from the original fires back in 2019/20 and mixed it with the modelling clay, and repaired the pieces, as best as I could, to show the resilience and the fact that, when something is repaired, sometimes the repair can be stronger than the original.”
The exhibition presents a range of art mediums that Cate works in, including a feature installation of delicately hanging raw silk cocoons into which she has integrated natural elements like cicada shells, skeletal leaves and dried wildflowers.
It Hangs By a Delicate Thread opens at Childers Arts Space from Thursday 20 February, with a free opening event on Saturday 22 February from 3 pm.
Art lovers keen to hear more about the exhibition and Cate’s arts practice can also join a free art walk with the artist on Thursday 27 February at 10 am.
Find out more in the Bundaberg Regional Galleries Autumn program on the Arts Bundaberg website.
