EMILY ten Raa clearly loves trees.
She sketched nearly 200 seedlings during her lengthy residency at Trillion Trees’ Hazelmere nursery, and then created a further 200-plus paintings from those drawings in her home studio.
The residency didn’t even exist until she asked nursery management if she could sit with volunteers and draw the hundreds of native species they grow every year.
• One of the stunning paintings on jarrah wood by Emily ten Raa in Seedlings of Hope.
“I wanted to align myself with a group that I think is doing really great work,” ten Raa says.
“The seedlings that Trillion grow are primarily for regenerating specific pieces of land, so they do a lot of community planting days and have sites that are specifically for regeneration.
“I’m interested in the potential collapse of the southwestern forest due to climate change and the mining and clearing that’s going on that the government keeps letting happen.
“I guess that’s directed me towards being more interested in native botanicals and trying to have exhibitions that will help the cause.”
Many of ten Raa’s drawings and paintings will be on show in Seedlings of Hope at Earlywork Gallery in South Fremantle. A highlight of the exhibition is a series of oil paintings done on old jarrah floorboards, which were originally part of a verandah.
Ten Raa painstakingly removed all the nails, sanded down the wood and treated it with oil, before she could even start thinking about painting her beloved seedlings.
For one large-scale oil painting, she had to hang about 18 different planks of jarrah individually because the assembled painting would have been too heavy to move.
“With the multi-panel painting, I think of it as many different people making a greater whole, like the volunteers at Trillion Trees,” she says.
“It’s basically people power.”
Ten Raa graduated from UWA in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts (Literature and Art History) degree, and from Edith Cowan University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Contemporary Visual Arts.
At ECU she won the Louise Macfee Painting Award, and also the ‘cream 4’ emerging artist award from emerge ART space.
She’s a full-time artist specialising in painting, woodwork and installation.
In recent years she has become interested in environmental activism and community involvement.
“One of my works, The Renovation, is based on the book The Memory of Trees by Viki Cramer,” she says.
“There’s this new term that’s growing in the ecological world, which is renovation as opposed to regeneration.
“The idea is that we don’t really have any hope of land going back to the way it was when it was healthier.
“But we’ve got to work with what we’ve got, and it’s kind of more like doing a renovation on the land.”
Seedlings of Hope is ten Raa’s fifth solo exhibition and she has been part of numerous group exhibitions across Australia, but this is her first time exhibiting in Freo.
Proceeds from Seedlings of Hope go to Trillion Trees’ nursery, and she’s planning to give attendees a free seedling to take home.
“They can become a custodian of that seedling and grow it in their garden,” she says.
Seedlings of Hope is at Earlywork Gallery, 9/330 South Terrace, South Fremantle from September 14 to 27.
For more info see earlywork.gallery and emilytenraa.com.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK