Billie Baker

Merricks House Art Gallery, Merricks VIC ||||

Tidepools is a series that contemplates human connection to the environment, a colourful project made with the intention to place emphasis on the hurting of our natural environment, brought on by climate change. Tidepools was created through the perpetual evaluation and thoughts of the footprints we leave on this earth, through the constant inspiration of nature that surrounds us and what we do as humans that impact Mother Earth.

Deep into a thought of a small world, an ecosystem, a pool of erotic goodness. Rockpools are a kaleidoscope into an underwater garden, and like gardens they are linked to the wider world. Their physical environments are a source of energy containing living things - seaweeds, sh, anemones and plankton. They are secret little portals to worlds that hold a diverse array of marine life. Rockpools are under constant scrutiny from surviving everchanging harsh environments, from the movements and quick changings of the tides to the eects of sunlight on the exposed pool. These ecosystems have to withstand these extreme changes of salt content and water temperature due to the temperature of the weather and the tidal movements created by the moon.

Billie’s works allow a certain kind of arousal for mother nature. Finding pleasure in the sensual aesthetics of the colours and textures in these small, otherworldly portals - the formations of these bright pink corals, the seductive shapes in the sea urchins and the silky green seaweeds oating in the water. The colours of these slow moving worlds are mind blowing, but seem to be forgotten by the masses - one of the many beautiful aspects of nature that is seemingly left behind in our battle of climate change.

These worlds look so small yet are still an important part of our wider world, our human race has been diminishing the importance of these small environments, and natural beauty is declining. Mother earth is bleeding. This project is created through the idea of human impact on mother nature, with the initial intention to document the attractiveness of these small colourful ecosystems. Billie’s process began with deconstructing climate change - beginning with the photo documentation to then digitally and tangibly altering and disguring these environments in order to place emphasis on the change created by a human. The impact that this change holds.

Billie has intentionally taken an image from our environment and changed it to the way she wants it to look. It is this behaviour and perception that has created a fault in the way we treat this earth. Tidepools is a collection of works that has been constructed to alter our awareness of nature, we can’t just leave it alone, we have spent decades changing it, to fit in with our expectations - ‘modied, reshaped, converted, reconstructed, developed, adjusted, remodelled’ however we want to describe it, we need to stop and change ourselves, live with nature not against it.