The work: Libby Derham, A Decline in the Dominant Species, 2021. Watercolour on board, 61 x 46cm. Courtesy: the artist.
Traditionally, landscape art conveys a sense of place via a painterly translation of an artist’s visual experience in a natural environment. However, watercolourist Libby Derham eschews convention within her practice, preferring instead to transcribe the ambient sounds that define her experience of the Australian bush. In her work A Decline in the Dominant Species, Derham has composed visual signatures for bird calls, describing it as an auditive landscape of Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in Queensland. It contains traces of the machine-gun call of a Lewin’s honeyeater, alongside the restrained harmony of scrubwrens and the resounding cry of the eastern whipbird. Through the use of masking fluid, Derham creates lines that are an absence of colour, evoking soundwaves as they travel through the foliage across the landscape. As a fourth-generation watercolourist, she strives to push the classic medium into contemporary practice, intuitively piecing together her works through a personal vocabulary of line and form. The birds chosen for this piece are considered dominant species and therefore generally not considered in discussions of human impacts upon the environment. However, the artist worries that it is only a matter of time.