Environmental sculptures on display

WOOREEN artist Meg Viney demonstrates ingenuity, using an array of mediums to create her ‘environmental sculptures’.

“I’m constantly gathering stuff from the environment, so I tend not to shop in art stores,” Meg said.

Many of her sculptures incorporate natural plant paper she makes from scratch using locally sourced plants.

For instance, she gathers pampas grass to create beautiful pale green paper.

Meg demonstrated her papermaking technique for the Sentinel-Times, using a mould and deckle she built consisting of a wooden frame and fly wire.

Red Hot Poker was the plant of choice, with the paper being made from the grass-like foliage rather than the dramatic flower from which the plant’s name is derived.

Meg blended the already cut and cooked plant fibres, pouring the resultant dark red liquid into her mould and deckle.

She pressed out the excess liquid with a cloth, transferring the newly created wet paper sheet onto newspaper to dry.

Meg described how she developed her artwork ‘papaveraceae’, the latin name for the poppy family, and the materials she used.

The poppy sculpture sits on a base made from cumbungi paper produced from cumbungi (river reed) she harvested from creeks.

During the papermaking process, before the newly created cumbungi sheet dried, Meg embedded tiny pieces of grass gathered on her walks with dog Wally.

That addition to the cumbungi paper added texture to the base of the poppy piece, giving it visual pop.

Air dry clay was used to create the poppy head, eradicating the need for kilning.

Lettuce paper surrounds the poppy head, simply made by sun drying lettuce leaves.

Translucent silk dyes were used to paint the work, with the poppy stems created from wire tightly hand wrapped in thread.

The art piece took around a month to make and, like Meg’s other environmental sculptures, is sealed in a clear case protecting it from damage.

Despite the painstaking nature of the creative processes involved, she happily sells her environmental sculptures, believing that encourages her to move forward and keep creating more.