Canaipa Mudlines art and environment collective is based in Quandamooka country, on the South Moreton Bay Islands, just off the coast of South East Queensland. While most of our activities take place on Canaipa - Russell - Island, the other islands of the bay and the nearby mainland coast have also been sites of our excursions.

 

Our ethos is aligned with worldwide art and environment movements. Our responses to the ecological challenges of the current times - climate change - are based on a shift in how we connect to place, to country. Change in behaviour comes with a change in valuing: If we treasure something, feel invested in it, feel ourselves to be part of it, we will not want to participate in its extinction. Thus we value the sticky pungency of mangrove mud as much as the scented eucalypts and sedge grass wetlands.

 

By what means and by what measures do we know a place, and augment the richness of our engagement? We contend that connection is a sensed thing: tactile, aural, olfactory, but also remembered, caressed... knowing a thing by the way it yields in the hand, the extent of flex in a stick, the strength in a vine, the viscosity of clay or mud. We meet these material qualities of the natural world half way, somewhere between our feeling for them and their feelings for us. Thus in handling and manipulating and imagining within the calm entanglement of our natural ecology we come to know something about the world and our part in it. 

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