Visual Art / Creek Walks by Jo Hollier. At Belconnen Arts Centre, until October 12. Reviewed  by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS.

Jo Hollier’s exhibition at Belconnen Arts has been inspired by her walks along  the creeks that  run through the South East National Park located between the Monaro and the South coast region of NSW.

In this area of great beauty, the artist has found the rich material for her depictions of the local trees, plants and birds. However, in another sense Jo Hollier has been following this journey for most of her 20 years of creative art practice. In a catalogue note to another exhibition held in Canberra Botanic Gardens in January,  the artist recalled her early interest in plants  in the Botanic Gardens. She was inspired no doubt by her father, a CSIRO research scientist in plant industry.

Hollier’s practice is centered around printmaking – a medium in which she has great technical skills.

She uses many of  printmaking techniques – among them etching, dry point, monoprint, collagraph and eco prints. Each one is chosen sensitively to suit the subject. Her powers of observation and draughtsmanship are evident. Birds and flora are easily identifiable. They are depicted not as specimens to be pinned down forensically on a page but as living nature inhabiting the environment where they belong.

Even when Hollier draws directly on to the page as in, Ode to the Banksia integrifolia, and in, Eucalyptus nuts, the trees and plants (although having  botanical verisimilitude) still retain the essence of living things with their decorative quality enhanced. Subtle use is made of the technique of the collagraph where flat shapes and materials are stuck on to a hard inked surface before printing.

This brings a textured and painterly quality to a series of prints – Grassy Woodland, Reedy Creek triptych and Forest Frieze where the artist suggests the density of the vegetation in the landscape.

Colour is not always used in a descriptive sense but rather more to create a background mood and suggestion of context. From the landscape Hollier abstracts its individual notes with actual leaves being inked and printed on a background or being captured as fluid shapes in eco resist dying. Nuts and leaves of the various banksia specimens are also depicted in works such as Coastal Banksia 11 and Banksia Integrifolia where their decorative qualities are also explored.

And of course, there are the birds. Hollier records a wide selection of the birds that inhabit the environment of the bush and scrub of the forest. They are depicted accurately with a loving eye to their natural habitat or against soft muted backgrounds. Among the birds there are tiny wrens, sharp-billed yellow  honey eaters, eastern spinebills, quick flitting red-brow finches, a lone kookaburra, a prancing Lyrebird, a shy Bell Bird and a portrait of a quizzical black cockatoo in a work entitled Saw toothed Banksia and Yellow Tailed Black.

In this exhibition Jo Hollier invites us to join her in her creek walks and rejoice in the abundance of nature that inspires her work.