Art Feature: Grassy Woodlands

Carolyn Young and Sue McIntyre

Australian visual artist Carolyn Young lives in New South Wales, among grassy woodlands and kangaroo-manicured paddocks. In her art practice, she aims to build connections between culture and nature by drawing on the knowledge of nature stewards and, through photography, sharing these stories with the public, rethinking and reimagining with us the human place in nature.

In her series Grassy Woodlands, Young’s landscapes and still- life form photographs document native grasslands and their farmed descendants in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, subtly depicting the enormous changes wrought by Europeans on Australian grasslands since the nineteenth century.

Grassy woodlands, or the remnants of them, are the rural backdrop that most city dwellers drive through when they visit a friend or relative in Australia’s southeastern countryside, a landscape of green or tawny brown open paddocks and scattered open-grown trees with short trunks and broad spreading crowns. But trees only represent a tiny fraction of the plant species that grow in this ecosystem.

Most of the species are in the ground layer. In many cases where one sees woodland trees, nearly all the native plant diversity beneath them is gone. The hundreds of grass and wildflower species that once occupied an acre of grassland in New South Wales have been reduced to a handful. Virtually all the species that are now considered native to the region had been managed for tens of thousands of years by means of aboriginal burning and hunting practices. From the mid-twentieth century these same grasslands have been subject to industrial farming regimes that are a far cry from the conditions under which they evolved.

These changed conditions also no longer allow for the establishment of eucalypt seedlings. Thus the lack of young trees in a paddock indicates farming’s effects on the ground layer and warns of a complete loss of trees and wildlife habitat in the future. “We readily accept the worn-out truism that ‘Australia rode on the sheep’s back,’” Young’s collaborator, woodland ecologist Dr. Sue McIntyre writes in their book Grassland in Transition, “but fail to appreciate that all those sheep (and cattle, horses, etc.) rode on the ‘grasses’ back,’ so to speak. Due to their ability to capture the sun’s energy and transform it into food, fuel and fibre, grasslands are arguably our most important enduring resource. We need to understand the attributes of the plants that are being lost from the system and those that are replacing them.”

Over a period of ten years, Carolyn Young photographed sixteen field sites in different seasons. Experimenting first with the landscape composition, she considered the different scales at which an ecologist “reads” a grassland (e.g. aerial, valley, paddock, and plot), finally settling on a composition and scale comparable to the scientific quadrat. The quadrat is a small rectangle, a few square metres in size, used by ecologists to repeatedly sample and subsequently describe vegetation. With her camera positioned high and angled acutely to the ground, the horizon is eliminated and the resulting photograph mimics the ecologist’s gaze.

The still-life forms represented in Grassy Woodlands, in which the plant is extracted from its ecosystem and photographed on a neutral background, provides a visual record of private investigation and reflection. It enables the viewer to appreciate the morphology and comparative scale of individual plant species and, when presented in a series, it communicates changes in plant diversity across field sites. Young’s field sampling and compositional decisions were based on aesthetics, plant abundance, the seasons, signs of animal presence, and discarded human artefacts. The landscape and still-life form photographs each form a typology: assembled by observation, collection, naming, and grouping.

Carolyn Young (New South Wales, Australia) holds a PhD in visual arts from The Australian National University (Canberra) and an honours degree in Natural Resources from the University of New England (Armidale). Her book, Grassland in Transition, co-authored with Dr. Sue McIntyre, was published in 2018. Young has been the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including the 2018 Friends of the National Library Creative Arts Fellowship and the 2015 ANU Vice-Chancellor’s College Artists Fellow Scheme. In 2016 she was awarded the Centre for Contemporary Photography Salon Pat Corrigan AM Acquisitive Award, and shortlisted for the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award 2017 and the Bowness Photography Prize 2015. Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Parliament House Art Collection (Canberra), Artbank, Tamworth Regional Gallery (Tamworth), Pat Corrigan Collection, and The Australian National University (Canberra).

“Reference Grassy Woodland (Bookham Cemetery), Spring,” 2014, 90.0 h x 72.5 w cm, archival inkjet print, © Carolyn Young.

“Reference Grassy Woodland (Bookham Cemetery), Active Flowering,” 2014, 70.2 h x 87.2 w cm, Archival inkjet print, © Carolyn Young.

“Native Pasture, Spring,” 2010, 90.0 h x 72.5 w cm, archival inkjet print, © Carolyn Young.