Painting with nature's palette
Story: April Spadina | Photo: Cody Fox
Nestled under the floorboards are dusty jars of butterfly wings, abandoned bird’s nests and the shells of Christmas beetles past. Among these collections, Joolie Gibbs is completely in her element. This is her art studio which she shares with the mud hornets and geckos. The gumnuts, twigs and seedpods are not only her art inspiration but may form part of her finished piece in one way or another. An accomplished artist, Joolie’s stunning work is created from layer upon layer of handmade inks poured and painted onto huge sheets of paper, some reaching nine meters long. Other pieces are made of stitched threads embellished with old clay buttons and seeds, encaustic bees wax papers burnished to shine and natural fibres collected from swamps and native bushland that surround her.
As an enthusiastic hiker and wildlife forager she gathers reeds and leaves to reduce to a pulp or liquid concentrate from which she then creates paper and inks. She experiments with different plants - Agave, Mistletoe, Ironbark, Eucalyptus, Pecan and Gympie Messmate - mixing them with iron water, citric acid, copper and other natural substances to create a chemical reaction. Each ink is added to journals, pages of earthy coloured stripes record the process and the effects of natural light and colourfastness of the natural inks. Her process is lengthy and filled with love, compassion and conservation of the environment.
Joolie is a quiet activist, an environmentalist who goes about her conservationism with gentle militance. Her beautiful paintings often share a hint of a message for the viewer to discover amongst the subject matter, the title of the works, or perhaps the journey behind the creation that is her activism. It’s her way of saying it without actually saying it, that speaks loudly.
Her current body of work entitled “If Trees Could Talk” is being created from a deep love of the coastal rainforest and treed environment of the Cooloola region. In 2023 Joolie undertook the Cooloola Great Walk with a fellow wildflower enthusiast and hiker, and for five days the two friends immersed themselves in the environment, coming out the other end exhausted and sore, disheveled and looking like part of the landscape, but with a greater appreciation for the bushland and a burning desire to protect it from destruction by development. Joolie’s immersion into this landscape will form intricate, large scale works from handmade inks and papers will be part of a combined exhibition in 2025, funded by RADF.
It’s the process of decay that stirs Joolie and she feels comfortable knowing that her footprint on the earth will be a small one as she steps lightly amongst the environment she loves. Through the many years Joolie has been heavily involved in the art world as a commercial artist, Gallery Curator and visual artist herself, she has become aware of the lasting effects of art on the planet, particularly acrylic paints and resins and she is comforted in her ethos that her art will one day become part of the natural landscape again, decay being a natural part of the life of her creations.
Joolie was awarded the Hervey Bay Boat Club People’s Choice Award of the 2023 Girra: Fraser Coast National Art Prize.
This story appears in the March 2024 edition of Fraser Coast Scene, our monthly guide to What's On across our Cultural Services venues.
The creation of this story and photography was funded by Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF). RADF is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Fraser Coast Regional Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
