WRV Artists’ Project is a collective of artists who work together to support environmental activism through art-practice. We began as 9 artists, on the initiative of its curator Juliet Fowler Smith, to support the movement to protect the Williams River, and the locality’s unique heritage, community and productive agricultural land. After plans for the Tillegra Dam were abandoned in November 2010, we extended our attention to other areas of NSW threatened by environmental degradation.
The extended Smith clan planned a gathering for December to say goodbye to their family connection to Munni, but following the the NSW government's abandonment of the Tillegra Dam plans, it became a celebration.
Photo shows the Smith clan on Munni's highest point, on what will now stay as Manns Hill rather than becoming an island in Tillegra Dam.
Our process is to familiarise ourselves with places under threat across New South Wales by being observer-supporters of activist campaigns underway to protect them. We use these as 'research residencies' for exhibitions and publishing that use the witnessing role of art to draw public and art-world attention to environmental debates and to the remarkable work of front-line activists. The events and campaigns that we have attended or in which we have participated in this way, are posted on this blog. After the community campaign against the Tillegra Dam was won by community activism in 2010, we moved on to the threat of coal and CSG mining, especially in the Bylong valley, the Leard State Forest and Bulga. This blog documents the exhibitions and publications that we have produced through this process.
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