Exploring farm ruins for art's sake

A fun day for her and partner Matt Colbrook is heading out in their car in search of a fallen-down farmhouse or an old country church, around which they draw, fossick for remnants and seek creative inspiration.

She estimates she has visited hundreds of old farm buildings over the past 20 years, which she finds by exploring, googling local historic sites or via abandoned houses in Australia Facebook sites.

"There is quite a big movement of people who love exploring abandoned ruins and abandoned farm houses,'' Ms Davis said.

"There are some amazing historical places in Australia."

The Bridgetown-based artist takes her renew, reuse, recycle, slow art ethos into all aspects of her life, as a avid antiques collector and dealer, upcycle clothing designer, old weatherboard house restorer and gardener.

She said her earlier works focused on mothers of the era and the lives lived in their rural households - two earlier pieces were set in old church windows.

Her latest series takes its cues directly from old farm buildings themselves.

It was inspired by a recent antique sourcing and art inspiration trip the couple made across the Nullarbor and into South Australia, via the Flinder's Ranges.

Ms Davis particulary loved Balladonia station and exploring historic Quorn and Burra, in South Australia.

"I loved the ruins, how they had been left, they had been left to rot away,'' Ms Davis said.

"What I found interesting, and heartbreaking at the same time, was that the early colonial families who came to settle in South Australia were free settlers and came from England, Wales and Germany - those sorts of places.

"They had a good first year of rainfall, so they thought they would be able to create successful farms and the land looked good for farming.

"But then they copped about 10 or more years of drought.

"They established farms and buildings, but then the drought meant all the families had to leave.

"It's an interesting correlation between those drought-struck areas and what we are going through locally this summer."

The series will now be displayed in the couple's restored weatherboard cottage on their small acreage outside Bridgetown, with their home opened for the first time to inquisitive visitors as part of the annual Blackwood River Arts Trail.

The trail, which is open until this Sunday, April 7, sees 67 artists open their home studios to offer a glimpse of their creative process and environments.

Exhibitions are held across more than 35 venues, including cafes, gardens, gift shops, smaller galleries and collective spaces.

Now in its fourth year, the event offers a chance to explore the region's towns and villages, along character-filled streets and country laneways.

As part of the event, a variety of creative workshops are also offered by artists along the trail.

Ms Davis will next month host a still life workshop and, via her clothing label Django's Couture, she will demonstrate how to upcycle an existing garment to "change it into something more wearable''.

The trail also incorporates the Blackwood River Film Festival, in which films by Australian filmmakers will be screened in Bridgetown on the first weekend and Nannup on the final weekend.

Based on last year's numbers, trail organisers are expecting about 150,000 venue visits this year, with about $80,000 worth of art sales and a further $800,000 in visitor spending in the region.

The majority of those visitors will travel from Perth (63 per cent) and about 10pc from regional WA - with a small group of interstate and international tourists - highlighting its value as a tourism drawcard.

Ms Davis is participating in the trail for the fourth year, rejoining other acclaimed regional artists such as painter Lori Pensini and Miranda Free and sculptor Kim Perrier.

Having grown up on a farm at Waroona with artist parents - and with Mr Colbrook from a farming and market garden background at Cootamundra, in New South Wales - the couple has settled very happily in Bridgetown, in a circa 1919 weatherboard cottage on a neglected small acreage they bought three years ago.

It has since had its boards and timber windows replaced and is filled with antiques they have collected over the years.

"We quickly set about renovating,'' Ms Davis said of the derelict old cottage.

"We love growing our own food and gardening and when we bought this property it had big trees but no garden at all.

"We have established a beautiful garden and a pretty good vegie patch and we are pretty much self-sufficient."

The couple run an antiques business on the property, plus a clothing/homewares/art business, Totem Rustic - Totem Bohemia.

They have been part of the Festival of Country Gardens and for the previous Blackwood Valley Art Trail, Ms Davis hung art works in a gallery in front of their house.

"Everything in our house is an antique,'' she said.

"It's a bit like a museum and stepping back in time itself, so I think people will be interested to have a look.

"The art I am doing now plays nicely with the style of the house as well."

Ms Davis studied visual art at Curtin University in Perth, majoring in textiles and minoring in painting.

"So I combine the two processes in my work,'' she said.

"I've been working this way for more than 20 years.''

Mr Colbrook is an Afghanistan veteran, who finds gardening, renovating and being creative a good way to deal with post-traumatic stress.

He has engineered the woodwork for two of Ms Davis horse sculptures this year - the pair often work collaboratively and see themselves doing a lot more of that in the future.

For both her textile artwork and clothing range, Ms Davis uses only the antique and vintage material remnants she finds on her travels - including old lace, silk and velvet.

"All the linen I am working on is pre-1900s, a lot of the linen was hand-woven and the lace was handmade,'' she said.

She spends a lot of time drawing onsite at ruins, but on her latest trip also fossicked around the grounds.

"We started to find all the tiny, little fragments of ceramics,'' she said.

"We found ironstone ceramics that date from 1850 to 1880, when these houses were settled.

"They would have used the ceramic for their plates.

"There were cattle and sheep on those properties and the ceramics had been trampled into the ground and completely broken, but they were still so precious.

"I have been combining the tiny, little ceramic fragments into the artworks and working them onto linen that is from the same era."

She said she had started exploring "a big topic" in the new series, which she was only just getting started with.

It means she will continue to focus on women and children, and the hardships they would have had to try to maintain their homestead in the harsh conditions of the era.

"They would have struggled to keep the linen white, they did it amazingly well,'' she said.

"I want to keep working on this and do some more exploration and bring it back to WA ruins as well,'' she said.