URSULA THEINERT
Environmental Expressionist
In 1992 I travelled to Bahrain, an island state in the Middle East, with my husband and son, and taught in an International school. I enjoyed the full and rich experiences of living as an expatriate for eleven years, including visiting many European and Middle Eastern destinations. On returning back to Australia on the eve of the second Gulf War, I fell head over heels in love again with this beautiful country of ours and through my travels came to value the preciousness and fragility of the natural world.
I am concerned by the challenging environmental issues which confront and threaten our global future and believe in the importance of art to stimulate and encourage discussion of these complex and emotive choices. My work explores the relationship that humankind has with the environment, and I focus on the profound spiritual connection we have with nature and the duality of our behaviour to the world. I draw inspiration from the Australian bush around my home, amid remote farms, plantations and quarries.
While working on my Photography Major, I felt that my ability to express our spiritual connection to nature was strengthened through this medium and found that it was important and necessary for me to combine my love of painting and photography. This marriage of disciplines began during my ‘Forest Management Series’, with the interconnections of the images, extending the perceived scenes to panoramic and mystical portals. The joined images reinforce the sense of balance and reflection, and seemingly invite the viewer into a new way of seeing and perhaps a new beginning. The strength of these influences has become even more intense after my husband Werner, and I faced and survived the Black Saturday fires. My ‘Fire Series’ focused on the pervading spiritualism that I poignantly experienced during Black Saturday while defending my home. The reflected images created abstracted geometric formations giving kaleidosopic patterning alluding to an otherworldliness.
My paintings often incorporate text to assist the viewer in connecting with the emotional and intellectual premise of my expressions in an attempt to understand the outcomes of the unbalanced pressures placed on the natural environment, and the perception of ownership, fragility and destiny. The use of diptyches and triptyches also relates to my spiritual investigation as the panels herald back to the altar art of the Renaissance, where the artists painted emblems of both this world and eternity. In the top and bottom diptyches I am being a little inventive by elongating the segmented views. Each painting trying to be complete by itself, but more poweful as a whole. I am trying to create a conceptual hierarchy and a tension in the viewer by seeing the ‘real’ world but inferring a ‘spiritual’ realm.
My work has always represented the land as ‘Mother Earth’, a living entity, to create empathy, and help the viewer reflect on the ‘hidden’ and ’surface’, aspects of our perceptions about what we see, understand and experience around us. I have focused on ‘Erosion’, ‘Forest Management’ and Black Saturday in my ‘Fire Series’, and recently began a new series called ‘Reenchantment’.
In my ‘Reenchantment Series’ my core concept still remains the belief that the intimate relationship we have with the environment is built into the human psyche. However, I feel that since the Black Saturday fires I am even more interested in understanding the basic need that humans have to ask questions about the world, as the enquiry also becomes an internal question about oneself, and the eternal “Who am I?” I feel that our increasing desire to protect the environment and questioning seeing the natural world as only useful raw materials for our use, is an enlightening investigation and one which makes us see nature once again as magical and sacred.
