Welcome to Conservation Through Art Australia (CTAA). Initially, I’d like to thank you for your interest.
For some reason I was born an artist. My gift is my eyes. I see things that others don’t see. Or if they see them, they don’t appreciate them. One of my life callings is to bring these things into focus for other people’s attention and appreciation – if I can. I am a photographer – a finder and seer of things. I was also born a surfer. Sometimes I feel like I’m part fish. I suffer physically and mentally – literally – if I don’t see and experience the ocean regularly. I come to life as a person within the intertidal and wave energy zone of the coast and in remote bush settings.
A kind of mid life crisis prompted several significant universal philosophical questions, with one in particular proving to take precedence over the others for me – ‘is money the root of all evil, and evil the root of all money?’ I’m actually hoping to explore this question in the public domain through this initiative. I’m sure that everyone and anyone reading this has heard that clichéd saying ‘be the change in the world you wish to see’. Conservation Through Art Australia (CTAA from her on) is my attempt at living out this idea in real life. It is a test of sorts – an experiment thrown out to the world and society to see what the world throws back. Perhaps if the outcome is positive, we will all feel a bit better about society.
CTAA is an attempt at bringing together several unresolved conundrums in my life and it reflects a kind of solution to my life long problem of having to align my personal value system with what is a harsh, real world reality of pragmatic economics. I’m asking the world to help me align these value systems, as both art and conservation require philanthropic/public support and I don’t have the resources to do this on my own. CTAA is an attempt to tie up loose ends, so to speak, and to channel apparently divergent and disparately related life pathways into one consolidated, productive and meaningful venture. It is the aggregated culmination of long term and ongoing ideas that, as yet, have not evolved into anything real.
After studying an Honours degree in Fine Art (and finding that Australia provides little support for practicing artists) and then a degree in Environmental Management (and finding that Australia provides little opportunity for paid conservation work), I was faced with one huge dilemma – what to do with these two degrees in an ultra utilitarian, economic rationalist society. It was through the wrestle with this problem that CTAA came about. CTAA is an independent, solo, grass roots creative initiative that attempts to resolve the above-mentioned problem by engaging people initially in art and science simultaneously, then in the socio-economic and environmental problem of Environmental Impact Assessment. CTAA also explores the concept of sustainability in the sense that – if successful – it represents a kind of closed loop, sustainable initiative. Landscape and nature photography, which hopefully appeals to the masses, will be sold to raise money for the conservation of natural places – the places that provide that initial opportunity for unique photographic and aesthetic appreciation.
