reconstructed landscapes | Annie Burns

We are fortunate in Australia to have retained some relatively pristine wilderness areas, but climate change, deforestation and the destruction of the environment are rapidly altering our natural world.

The nascent global movement of rewilding, in areas such as Europe, is restoring lost ecological processes. Does our future include the rewilding of Australia in an attempt to restore a small part of the complex natural environments we are currently destroying? Spending time in the bush, the forests, the desert or a garden nourishes our souls, but also raises issues of the interplay between humans and the rest of nature - our violence and exploitation of the natural world.

Tasmania's magnificent forests and Victoria's old growth forests are unique and enchanting areas. Dripping, verdant, lush and green, these forests abound with ferns, strange luminous fungi and ancient Gondwanaland trees, festooned with dripping mosses and lichens.

Annie Burns is an Australian visual artist, currently living and working in bushland on the outskirts of Melbourne. Her recent work is informed by this environment and its beauty and vulnerability as the area faces the impact of climate change, hotter and drier weather and increasingly severe and frequent bushfires.