About the Project
Bringing country and city communities together to create an awareness through art of the lack of fresh water supplies and what happens to the land as a result of salinity within Australia.
The goal is to create an image of a river made from 60,000 paintings( Inspired by beautiful frozen fresh water crystals or something that is important to them) placed on a dry salt lake. ( able to be seen from a jet airlines that often fly over the salt lakes of Lake King.)
The 30cmx30cm paintings created by children and interested parties from around Australia will be placed down on the dry lake of Lake King in a choreographed manner, by local children. The movement of the children will represent the flow of life and the flow of fresh water coming out of the salt pans, first as a trickling creek and then larger as a flowing river. The paintings which are all important and precious to the artist are to be placed onto the land.
The finished and moving image in progress will be filmed from the air and from ground level.
The paintings that symbolically represent the preciousness and importance of the land are left on the lake over winter and into summer to battle the elements. They are left until the lake dries up leaving them covered in salt crystals, mud and in whatever state they are in. Each painting was once important and beautiful but is now a piece of that salt pan. Unloved, unusable.
The paintings from the outer edges of the once fresh river in their salty and muddy form are then pulled up and placed in a truck to be taken back to Perth city. These unrecognizable pieces which symbolically represent disjointed pieces of unusable, saline land are placed down on the sidewalks through the city, representing the diabolical state of our growing local, national and global salinity problem.They will be placed down starting from (an appropriately chosen named place) Forest Chase and ending as a disjointed flow into the Swan River, off the Narrows Bridge. This connection then links back to Lake King because that is the location of the source or origin of the Swan River catchment plain, linking it back to the salt lakes.
The idea of this is to bring the salt, the mud, the lake, the land, THE MESSAGE to the passing people. The mud signifies the dry dusty land, the change of fresh water to salty water, the drying up of or evaporation of water, leaving salt crystals and dried mud where it was once beautiful fresh water and productive land.
The Message will be on a prominent plaque explaining the significance of the project.The children who are laying the destroyed paintings on the footpaths will be handing out information leaflets referring to the land salinity problems and the possible solutions for the farmers.