At Bribie Island, like the rest of the world, the natural environment is in tension with progress. Pine plantations compete with national forest for the native landscape; the scrub is excavated for new estates, many of which are claimed to be ‘green’. But how can the natural forest and brush land co exist with any modern human settlement of any size?

Increasingly humans seem entirely incompatible with nature. I know I am, I like my air-conditioned, my climate controlled, my water chlorinated and my plants and animals on a plate. Each generation develops it’s own relationship with nature which find expression through cultural means. The wide-screen, plasma, oracle box in the lounge room is the prime generator and mediator of our culture and it paints a bleak picture. The 21st century vision of nature is increasingly one of a vengeful deity bent on punishing us for lacking piety with rising sea levels, melting ice caps and rising temperatures; it lashes us with all kinds of fury, floods, fires, tsunamis. Caspar David Friedrich’s early 19th century, romantic version of nature was a pussycat compared to the one peddled on our screens.

In this vision, nature is not a thing to be trusted and it’s understandable why we would push it to the margins. The recent bushfires in Victoria have reinforced the necessity to clear the area around the sites we inhabit of natural stuff to avoid catastrophe. How can we use water-harvesting strategies to provide water to long-term draught stricken areas if we are not to further disrupt the planet? We like to idealise nature as our generous friend, to honour it with our carefully maintained gardens, after all we can’t live with out it, but as we pay the price of over-population and over-exploitation our relationship with nature must become increasingly complex. We become distant, opposed and distrustful.

Undercurrents is a body of work that acknowledges the ambivalence with which we must regard nature at a time when we are told nature is reasserting her powerful presence. Images of different worlds each with its particular values, tastes, and concerns layered upon another.

Extract from catalogue essay by Ray Cook, the catalogue will be available from the QCP during the exhibition.