Artists Gather for Tasmanian Forest Celebration

Huon Valley Environment Centre’s tenth anniversary music and arts festival

Huon Valley Environment Centre will celebrate it’s tenth anniversary with a 3 day music and arts festival that will begin this afternoon, at Lonnavale. At the Rivers Edge Campground in Lonnavale, Southern Tasmania, a festival with international, national and local musicians will commence at 6pm.

Headlining artists at the festival include, Barons of Tang, Delaney Davidson, Jake Savona, Saritah, Combat Wombat’s Monkey Marc and Elf Transporter.

The celebration is to mark the tenth anniversary of the grassroots environment organisation. The volunteers at the Huon Valley Environment Centre have organised a festival with live music, food stalls, films, childrens entertainment and a guided tour of the threatened forests of the weld valley. There will be three days of live music, and the event will culminate on Monday.

Australian Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown will be speaking on Saturday at 4pm, to mark the momentus occasion of the environment centre’s tenth anniversary.

‘We are looking forward to a weekend of celebrations of all our community based environmental advocacy that our volunteers and supporters have made over ten years. We expect a large number of people to gather over the weekend to enjoy the live music in a fantastic setting along side the Russell river,’ Huon Valley Environment Centre’s spokesperson Jenny Weber said.

Celebrations will continue with a art exhibition that will open on Friday 27 Jan at the Franklin Church Studio. A number of prominant Tasmanian artists will collaborate for a significant art showing of prints, sculpture and photographs. The exhibition titled Artists behind the Action is being held to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Huon Valley Environment Centre. Biographies of two of the artists showing at the exhibition are below.

Marcus Tatton sculpture Carbon Stack (see attached image) has been finished this week and stands out the front of the gallery on the main road of Franklin.

Marcus Tatton ( exterior sculptural work )

New Zealand born Marcus Tatton received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (Furniture Design) from University of Tasmania in 1990 and has since exhibited widely around Australia and internationally. He is known particularly for his sculptural installations.

Marcus Tatton received the Sydney Water Environmental Sculpture Award (Sculpture by the Sea) in 2006, Montalto Sculpture Award (Victoria) and the Landcom Sculpture Award (University of Western Sydney) in 2008. He has created numerous public artworks in Tasmania and recently completed a major corten steel sculpture for Canberra entitled Wide Brown Land.

Marcus has worked in the grounds of Church Studio Franklin before, last year constructing Hominid, as part of a local Festival, Focus on Franklin. this year he returns with a piece called Carbon stack. As with hominid, Marcus has created a sculpture that uses metal structures to support his firewood constructions. Once the armature is in place, the timber is stacked onto the reinforcing rod sphere armature using fencing wire and staples to retain each piece of firewood in place. The central structure uses recycled heating cylinders to sheath the structural element.

He sees the construction as a question mark. Is it a natural icon? a symbol of a tree ? Or is it a chimney stack, billowing carbon? Maybe it is a power station fed by piles of wood, or a carbon stack on a pedestal?

Simon Pankhurst ( interior sculptural works)

Simon graduated from the University of Canberra in 1996 with a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture. He worked for several years as a landscape architect in Adelaide before travelling extensively throughout Australia, UK and Europe. He settled 4 years ago in Flowerpot, by the Channel, and since then he has been working full time as a metal artist and blacksmith. He is particularly interested in found objects, and forging new identities from the metal pieces that come his way.

Some of his recent work is on display in the exhibition

Jenny Weber, Huon Valley Environment Centre