Picture: Ian Kemp

Wendy Whitford

Poetry in Motion

Acrylic on canvas
90cm x 90cm

>> Wendy is a Ballarat-born and educated artist, a fine-art graduate of Ballarat College of Advanced Education (now Federation University).
She paints in acrylics and produces limited-edition collagraph prints.
As well as being a foundation member of SHAC, she has exhibited widely in solo and group shows, locally and in Melbourne.
Her most recent solo exhibition was of prints “time and place” at Fairbanks Eye Gallery and her most recent group outings have been with SHAC and also SHEILAS at Backspace Gallery and Fairbanks.
Wendy was a guide at the Art Gallery of Ballarat for many years.
 

Poetry in Motion

by Stacy Livitsanis

Gyrate my glassfibre plastic sonata
Piercing triskelia, aural errata
Noisy nocebo effect, spewing hot air
Cutting into reason, saying it’s not fair
Windswept mindsets, tilting at hills to die on
Inverted Martian tripods coming to cut carbon
Sky-slicing turbines, wailing pliant troika
Mutant towering whirligigs, humming, clean, eroica
Dynamic dynamo, triumphant triumvirate
Leavening our lively pioneer spirit
Multiplying on the plateau, renewable soothing monotony
Clones from our crisp mechanical neo-botany

Listen to Stacy’s poem:
 

>> Ever since seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at age eight, Stacy has embraced cinema as the greatest art form. He used to write about cinema for youth magazine Kindling, before taking a detour into carpentry. He now writes and thinks about movies more than any reasonable person should. Sometimes he writes about other things.
 
Wendy’s response to Stacy’s text:
There are divided opinions over wind farms, but I find them a source of celebration.
We must use all the resources which are natural and non-threatening in this changing world, to provide for our energy needs for the future.
Let us harness and be grateful for all of Nature’s free gifts, the sun, the tides and the wind.
It is unfortunate that wind turbines are saddled with a less than poetic name, when they are aesthetically pleasing, a kinetic sculpture on the horizon, creating graceful shadows on the hillsides. They are sculpture worthy of Alexander Calder. The gentle sounds as they harvest energy from the air are soothing, the animals grazing below are contented and undisturbed. We should be too.
 

A poster by Jarred Parkinson for text by Stacy Livitsanis.