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Di Masters

Di Masters is a graduate of the Tasmanian School of Art: Masters of Fine Arts & Design 2013 and Bachelor of Fine Arts 2011.

Reclaiming Ground

My etchings and aquatint images are a response to my own experience of living and working in small rural and remote communities; the various landscapes, events and cultures which have impacted significantly on me and others who have migrated and resettled, many times, finding their place and a way to belong. My sense of what it means to belong has been communicated pictorially by the use of elemental landscape ( fire, water, air and earth ) and vessels motifs.

Some images have a narrative of human struggle but ultimate success through adherence to, and sharing of strong cultural traditions and celebration, practices which have enriched the new society within which many migrants find themselves. Other images reference the drift of shared knowledge and cultural practice through different landscapes.

Through my image making, I have come to understand that a sense of belonging may not be about being rooted within a particular landscape but can be a nomadic perspective, that of being at home in a state of transit across many landscapes. – Di Masters

Undercurrent 2017

“Have you ever thought of what the microscopic, drifting, primary producers that the ocean is teeming with have done for you? These are the phytoplankton, and they are grazed by animals known as zooplankton. All ocean life and we humans, depend on plankton because they are the start of the food chain. 

Plankton dominates the biomass of the oceans. Phytoplankton perform nearly half of the photosynthesis on Earth, fixing carbon dioxide and producing half of the oxygen we breathe. The most common zooplankton, the copepods, outnumber insects as the most abundant animals on Earth. The abundance and success of all marine life is dependent on the health of the plankton. They are our oceanic “canaries in the coal mine”. Plankton also impacts human health directly. Some phytoplankton species are toxic and form large harmful algal blooms, contaminating shellfish and causing poisoning and death in humans. Some zooplankton are venomous, such as the box jellyfish and lrukandji species, causing severe pain and death and beach closures in Northern Australia. 

Plankton influence the pace and extent of climate change. Many phytoplankton species produce chemicals that influence rain and cloud patterns. Phytoplankton remove carbon from the ocean surface via photosynthesis. Zooplankton graze the phytoplankton and then export the carbon as faecal pellets or carcasses which sink to the ocean floor and lock the carbon from the atmosphere for thousands to millions of years – it would be much warmer if this carbon had not been taken up by the ocean. Over geological time, the accumulation of carbon from plankton on the seafloor has formed the oil and natural gas deposits we use today.”

So tread lightly.  – Di Masters 2017