WETLANDS IN TANDEM
Three days spent immersed in the calm beauty of a wetland on Tasmania’s East Coast turned out to be immensely productive for artist Sue Lovegrove and poet Adrienne Eberhard, who have created a book together, The Voice of Water.
Paired up as part of the Tasmanian Land Conservancy-Bett Gallery Poets and Painters project in 2016, Lovegrove and Eberhard found a rich source of inspiration in the Punchbowl wetlands, and discovered they worked well in tandem.
As they sat at the water’s edge, Eberhard played with words and expressions at the same time as Lovegrove sketched out her visual impressions of the same landscape.
The ease of their collaboration and the seamless blending of their disciplines surprised and inspired both of them.
“We were totally attuned and aligned in our response to the landscape,” Lovegrove says. “It was beautiful, sensory, the sound, the touch, in an aesthetic sense all so perfectly aligned, it was a real joy to work with someone like that.”
“It was so productive that about two years later I was still working with the same subject matter, painting from my sketches that I did at Punchbowl, so I suggested to Adrienne let’s do something more with this.”
They put together a grant application to the Australia Council and created a project continuing the theme of what they had started, working to create an exquisite linen-bound book celebrating the delicate beauty of Tasmanian wetlands featuring 30 paintings by Lovegrove matched with accompanying poems by Eberhard.
“Originally the project centred on the original wetlands we had visited and the nearby lagoon but when we revisited it, it had dried out,” Lovegrove says. “So we started searching for more freshwater lagoons on the East Coast to help us finish the project, which then became a conceptual idea of what a lagoon or a wetland should be.”
In February, at the end of a summer of visiting wetlands on the East Coast, the two artists put their accumulated material together to see what they had ended up with.
“As we started pairing up paintings with poems, they all fell into place within an hour, absolutely perfectly, it was incredible,” Lovegrove says. “Making a book is such hard work and there were times when we were both filled with self-doubt. But then we looked at how the paintings are so enhanced with her writing and, I hope, vice versa, it was such a unique and beautiful experience for us.”
Lovegrove lectures in drawing at the University of Tasmania’s Art School and Eberhard teaches writing at St Michael’s Collegiate. Lovegrove says the paintings are presented in miniature in the book to enhance the delicacy of the environment they showcase. “The paintings would sit in the palm of your hand, so as you hold the book you have a painting in one hand and a poem in the other, like holding an offering. The idea of that is, if a person can hold something in their hand, they will care for it, it is something delicate and precious.”
The Voice of Water is available at bookstores for $70.