Lake Eyre Landscape

Lake Eyre’s fragile ecology and the increasing impacts of climate change on the World’s largest single spiritual site is the subject of this visual investigation of science, landscape and context. In 2013 colpol travelled to Lake Eyre to experience a rare flooding event at the lake. The landscape paintings form a portion of a larger body of exploratory work regarding time, ecology and space.

The increased rate and scale of severe climatic events are not fully understood but felt by the people living there and they leave profound impacts and have fueled apocalyptic discourse., The traditional owners of the Lake Eyre, the Arabana people call the lake Kati Thanda, and the dual place name is Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre. The Dreaming path across the desert has spiritual importance to the Arabana people.

The paintings attempt to provoke viewers to consider this world through a visual nexus of art and science. The subject includes dried salt pans, heat waves, mirages, tornadoes, parched earth and eroded plains; the result of millions of years of uninterrupted, extreme, climatic effects.

The large-scale format arose through a visual exploration of the spatial aspects of salt pans from an aerial position; the extent of the landscape is not apparent at ground level and unreferenced from an elevated position.  The works attempt to evoke emotional responses through the portrayal of expansive uninhabited space, harsh conditions; blinding light, silence and toxicity.

The paintings are all oil on linen and approximately 3400x1800