International attention for Solastalgia artist Belinda Broughton
Following from the recent success of ‘Solastalgia: an antidote’ as part of Adelaide Fringe 2020 in Lobethal, we are pleased to note that German publication Monopol profiled artist Belinda Broughton and her work as part of the exhibition.
You can read the article (in German) here. A English translation of the article by Chris Oaten is as follows:
“The devastating fires in Australia robbed a couple of artists of a lifetime. Now Belinda Broughton and Ervin Janek are starting over - and making art out of the ashes.
The devastating coal with which Belinda Broughton paints the white wall of the "Factory" exhibition hall is crumbling. With every stroke, pieces break to the ground, dust trickles afterwards. Her fingers are black, she has to reach for a replenishment in a box every few minutes. "There's no shortage of that," says the Australian, grimacing. "I would just like to know what I have in my hand: is it a burnt branch? The remains of our kitchen table? Or from one of the wooden sculptures that my husband carved?" Fires in Australia stole a lifetime of work from an artist couple. Now Belinda Broughton and Ervin Janek are starting over - and making art out of the ashes.
The 61-year-old draws with what the flames left over from the belongings and the entire life's work of the artist couple. Until December 20, 2019, the painter and her husband, the sculptor and photographer Ervin Janek, 81, lived and worked in the Adelaide Hills, just outside the South Australian village of Lobethal. One house, two studios, all around fragrant eucalyptus trees. Then a branch fell on a power line in the neighboring town, a spark ignited the parched vegetation, and what happened to the Australians most feared this summer happened: A bushfire raged, fell over 25,000 hectares of forest, pastures and fields, destroyed 85 residential buildings, killed a neighbour.
When Broughton and her husband came home two days later - they had fled from the fire to their daughter in Adelaide - they found: collapsed walls, scorched corrugated iron roofs, rubble and ashes into which melted glass had clumped. And lots of coal. Everything else - furniture, photo albums, sketchbooks, drawers full of drawings, Janek's sculptures, 400 framed photographs - had consumed the flames.
Belinda Broughton, as featured in Monopol
With her mural, which describes a kind of time travel through the weeks experienced since then, the artist is making the most personal contribution to the exhibition, which the "Hills" artists had already planned months before for the Adelaide cultural festival "The Fringe" until March 15th. Its title is "Solastalgia", the new word describes the stress that people experience as a result of environmental degradation and fits into their history in a painfully up-to-date manner. Broughton, who had also become known as a nature writer and poet in the past, was supposed to "only" recite a few poems on the subject - now she was invited to design the eight-meter-long wall.
On the far left, she drew the original wilderness around her house with soft lines, which she loved so much: trees, bushes, ferns, behind which a hare hides. Then a handful of tangled lines follow, no more. "The sea of flames traumatized enough people. There was no reason for me to show it again." The scene afterwards consists of charred stumps, fallen trees and branches, all black. "Even the crows are silent," Belinda Broughton wrote.
A few weeks later, nature on her property began to regenerate - a spectacle that Broughton is as fascinated as it is inspired. "I can't stop watching what's going on out there," she says. And so the second half of her mural shows exactly that: mushrooms proliferate, fresh shoots sprout from charred eucalyptus trunks, others peel off their charred bark. Burnt-down grass trees explode like green fireworks, lizards return, insects, the screeching cockatoos and birds with more melodious singing.
"It was good for me to stand on this wall and create something," she says on the day the exhibition opened. "It distracted me from all the thoughts about the future." But that too is shaping up. Australian reservists have helped the artist couple, like the other Lobethal fire victims, to remove the ruins and cut down trees that did not survive the fire. Broughton and Janek are now planning the reconstruction with their daughter, an architect: a small, fire-proof house with a common studio. "It will never be the same again," says Broughton. "But it goes on."
