Cataract

The exhibition "Beyond a Big Land" was initiated to counterbalance more popular, cliched images and publicity about Australia as a "big' land relete with endless natural resources be they minerals, forests etc. The intention was to create photographic images that represented Australia as being the fragile, vulnerable country that many people see it as. In this respect the exhibition, although modest in scale, was unique as most exhibitions remotely addressing the same topic are historiacal. See: http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/countryandlandscape/exhibition_text.html; http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/oceantoOutback/Default.cfm?MnuID=3. Duxbury was selected by the curator, Stephen Wickham, to make work for this exhibiiton based on her previous work depicting fragile environments such as "Melt" 2008 and "Double Life" 2009. The exhibiiton was shown at a respected commercial Melbourne Gallery and was invited to be shown in an expanded form at the Geelong Gallery in 2011. The exhibition was supplemented by texts including one by Dr Christopher Heathcote, renowned local art historian. Duxbury made "Cataract", an 8-panel photographic work in response to the theme of the exhibition following a research expedition to Tasmania to document popular tourist locations in a different context. Duxbury took the images for 'Cataract' at Nelson Falls., a popular waterfall near Lake St Clair, in pouring rain which rendered the waterfall very difficult to photograph - only small areas were in focus at any time through the camera lens. The intention of the final work was to convey an image of a phenomenon not normally seen in this way to indicate its position in an environment apart from the picturesque.