John Wolseley, Wild Cries Wild Wings of Wetland and Swamp, 2010, Mockridge Fountain, City Square, swamp, birds
Summary
This painting was one of five temporary commissions for Mockridge Fountain in City Square, intended to disguise the fact that the fountain had to be turned off as part of water-saving measures during the drought, which reached its peak in about 2009. As a series, the group of five was titled ‘Propositions for an Uncertain Future: five responses, through art, to a fountain without water'. In addition to covering the bone-dry facade of the fountain, their purpose was to comment on environmental themes.
John Wolseley’s work certainly met the brief. Based on his drawings made in the Gwydir Wetlands of New South Wales and some threatened marshlands of south-eastern Victoria, it captures a moment of exuberant eruption as waterbirds fly skyward. With water as the link, Wolseley wanted to acknowledge the community memory of the fountain’s cascading facade and to point to a deeper ancestral memory of the place of wetlands and wilderness in the human psyche. He also wanted the work to be a cry for the fate of the wetlands of the world, which are being destroyed at an ever-increasing rate.
After the work was taken down it was returned in panels to the artist, who subsequently donated the work to the Melbourne Art Trust. In 2014, the painting was installed in the foyer of the newly refurbished Waterways office in Docklands.
