“Someone coloured my world today Not sure it will be there tomorrow- I hope it is!” Patricia Farrar

How beautiful, magnificent and endlessly mysterious is the natural world! My work raises awareness of what we have been given and hopefully engenders the commitment to care for it. I draw heavily on the sense of ‘listening’ in order to understand and encourage greater engagement.

The present urgency regarding climate change and the world’s need to do something about it has had a powerful effect on the direction of my work and my life choices. Consequently the first body of work happened in response to the urgency for action as the fires in Brazil raged last year. This was superseded by the extensive bushfires in Australia. What emerged from responding to these areas of concern was a desire to understand our connection, the ongoing interchange between all nature including us. This dialogue with the natural world is a continuous, unfolding awareness.

Abstraction allows me to respond to sound as well as visual images. Colour features strongly in the work and it is through colour that I feel able to truly express the joy I find in nature. All my work relies on my love of drawing and the natural instinctive use of language to express feelings and experience through poetry.

I have a long standing interest in ‘sound’ and its link with place and identity.  The opportunity for collaboration with the Ethernet orchestra brought this interest to the fore and expanded it to include my study of migration, place and identity. This orchestra is comprised of musicians from six different countries, improvising music from across the oceans to express a sound of total unity, harmony and individuality. My paintings for the collaboration to produce images for a CD cover are about sound waves, sounds of the oceans and my response to the entirely unique sounds produced by the orchestra. The work explores ‘improvisation’ through abstraction and is an extension of previous work done in improvising through listening to birdsound and making the connection with memory.