Dr Neil Fettling has agreed to judge the paintings for this year’s Daylesford Rotary Art Show to be held on Cup Weekend from the 30th of October to the 4th of November.
Neil is an exhibiting artist, with solo and numerous group exhibitions held throughout Europe, USA, Asia and Australia.
His recent work and research involves the history and sociology of North West Victorian Mallee dry land farmers and their determination to tame a vast semi desert land. This is traced through the collection and re-interpretation of the relics left behind on their farming properties. Neil is interested in the abundant waste and bloated heritage of our post-industrial materialism and how the cultural artifact has replaced nature as a signifier of meaning.
Currently he is working on a new series of paintings that continue an ongoing investigation into the Mallee and its ecological sustainability, viewed through the region’s boinkas (saltpan or shallow groundwater depressions) that occasionally brim with salty water.
The boinkas are largely the result of remnant surfical salt crusting from an ancient inland sea, but more recent clearing of adapted indigenous flora, (Eucalyptus Dumosa, pines and casuarinas, heath, saltbush and spinifex), for dryland cropping and irrigated horticulture, have seen these ubiquitous environments undergo further stress. This high salinity combined with algae and halo bacteria produces pink or red carotenoids giving the lake its pink colour.
In this series of works, the earth’s skin and biota reveal the cycles of inscribed human impact in conjunction with the scars inflicted by the forces of nature itself. All references to life sustaining water, however oblique, are gone and the primal mud has turned to environmental and apocalyptic sludge. Mud, the commonest of material has provided nearly all of life on earth. Geologists love mud; describing it as both an end (the end of the cycle of erosion) and a beginning (changes to sedimentary burial and diagenesis).
Neil has a long association with the Mildura district (35 years). He was the inaugural Director of the La Trobe University Art Institute, Head of Campus of La Trobe University Mildura, Senior Lecturer of Visual Arts at La Trobe University Mildura and previously, Head of the Art Department and Head of Centre (Arts and Community Education) at Sunraysia Institute of TAFE. He was previously the Chair of Mildura and Murray Darling Palimpsest – biennale contemporary visual art events where artists are invited to respond to environmental and social issues affecting inland Australia.
The La Trobe Art Institute was created in 2014 to bring together the Creative Arts Undergraduate and Post Graduate course delivery with Research/Regional development initiatives. It also amalgamated La Trobe’s two contemporary galleries and its significant collection of Fine Art objects.
Neil has a PhD at Monash University, and a Master of Arts by Research from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Previously, he completed a Diploma of Fine Art at Bendigo Institute of Technology and a Certificate of Fine Art and Language at the Paris American Academy in France.
He currently divides his time between Brunswick (Melbourne) and a painting studio in Central Victoria at Elphinstone.
