╳

This piece is an etching I made in Nipaluna / Hobart in 2008. I traced it from a photograph I had taken of a Giant Eucalyptus Regnans in the Weld Valley, the trunk was lying on the ground. To describe the scale, my friend was standing on the Treestump in the photograph and was just a little bit taller than the tallest spiky bit protruding from the stump. The piece is named ╳, it was exhibited in and donated to the 2008 Weld Echo organised by the Black Sassy Artist Collective / Huon Valley Environment Centre at the Long Gallery in Salamanca Place, Nipaluna / Hobart. It is called X because when the trees are about to be cut down they are marked with an x. Walking around in the Weld Valley, I saw many of the most beautiful and largest trees I have ever seen in my life, marked with ╳s:

This is a second version of the etching, with the addition of some archival pen. This one is called Eucalyptus Regnans:

This next image was a surprise discovery that we found when walking around in the Weld Valley a few years earlier. Most of what we’d been looking at were giant eucalypts and ground cover including naturally fallen logs and a large amount of moss on everything, it was difficult to walk around as there were no paths where we went. It was really surprising to find this little area that seemed to be clear. When we paused there we realised it was some kind of small swampy area, the ground cover there looked like something you might see on a pond. Then we noticed that there were lots of tiny frogs and that we had come to a special undisturbed frog place. We didn’t stay long so as not to disturb them any more than we already had. It was a special area that we were only exploring because it was about to be logged, and we wanted to see it while it was still there. This photograph was taken in 2005: