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My name's Julie Blyfield and I work
from Adelaide and I'm a jeweler and metalsmith
I'm part of the Abstract Nature exhibition
which has 20 artists from South Australia and around Australia.
For many years, my practice has been working with plants and nature.
Some of the pieces, the smaller coloured pieces
I actually worked from plant specimens and
basically used them as inspiration for these pieces.
The big bowl that I made, the silver vessel, which was called Drought
because we're in severe drought conditions
is not functional as a bowl because obviously
it's all pierced and hammered and textured
and it couldn't hold or contain water so
it was a bit of a metaphor.
The University of South Australia has actually purchased
the Windfall set of five sculptural pieces
for their collection, so it's very exciting to be
part of that collection, as years ago I actually
went to the University as a student, so it's fantastic
to think that some works will be permanently housed in a
collection in South Australia.
Certainly beauty is an idea that I've investigated
as a curator over a series of exhibitions
and it is the overwhelming thing that people say when they see
this show, they say how beautiful it is
and for me it's an idea that
beauty is connected, well one of the senses of beauty
that we have is connected to a sense of place
and so I was interested in the idea and also
a suggestive, emmersive approach to
landscape which isn't depicting landscape
it's about a connection between mind and landscape
and that connection is best expressed through abstraction.
This presents a particularly unique approach to
beauty that is very Australian
and a lot of the work in this exhibition you can see the definite
influence of Aboriginal art in the artists' work.
With all my work I'm trying to achieve
a sense of stillness and space that I
experienced in the vast landscapes of South Australia
and so these works come out of an experience
of going to Lake Gairdner and this time when
I walked there, the mirage I thought was ahead
was actually water
and just five mm or so of water
so when I continued to walk
it was almost as if walking on water
so you look down at the sky at your feet.
The water travels down from Northern Queensland and
the evaporation rates are so great that
most of the water then becomes cloud
so this work in here
has kind of been generated out of some of those thoughts of
time, distance, space and evaporation.