Fire and Rain
Zela Bissett’s body of work Fire and Rain formed part of a joint exhibition entitled Paper, with fellow artist Heather Matthew at Beaudesert Regional Gallery running from February until March 2023.
For many weeks I could not overcome feelings of pain, sadness and a taste of ash in my mouth. During that period I made the Firestorm series of works, using papers made from local plants, earths, burnt bark and charcoal collected from burned sections of the Cooloola (mainland) side of the sandmass.
Wild/flower Women
In August 2019, a group of regional artists from the wildflower regions of the Cooloola region of Queensland met for a weekend of walking, talking and art-making.
These wildflower artists work on many fronts to celebrate not just the beauty and diversity of native plants, but the ecosystems that support them. In the arts, in education, in research, in activism, they work to move on a great project which began as early as the early colonial era, when artists strove to protect natural places by sharing their beauty and appeal with a wider public.
Through Emerald Eyes
The exhibition Through Emerald Eyes at Gympie Regional Gallery combined several aspects of my journey, expressing concepts developed during my studies of a Master of Environmental Education degree and translating them into visual form.
During my studies, I came across the concepts of different shades of green which symbolized different levels of empathy with nature. Light green environmentalists tend to emphasize lifestyle/behavioral/consumer change as key to sustainability.