Chantale Delrue : An artistic homage to the environment. Her recent art.

By Marjie Courtis

Chantale Delrue is a busy artist with a Flemish heritage and an artistic career that has taken her from Belgium to Japan, Mexico, California and Australia. For the last three decades she has been living in Tasmania, initially in Launceston, but now in Hobart.

I met Chantale on a previous trip to Tasmania, after walking the Overland Track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair. I'd been rescued from knee-deep mud by one of her compatriots, a Belgian sculptor, who introduced us.

I've followed her artistic development and on every visit to Hobart, I see a further evolution of her captivating style.

Chantale has had a busy week and it's only the first week in January. This is the last day of a joint exhibition of Chantale Delrue and Lorraine Biggs at the Carnegie Gallery. This exhibition overlapped another exhibition of hers at the Handmark Gallery in Hobart's Salamanca Place. And she's finalising an artwork for an art competition for the Glover Prize.

I'm fortunate to make it to the exhibition, entitled Light and Shade. Chantale has focussed her exhibition on Mount Wellington, the imposing landmark that overlooks Hobart.

Chantale's work occupies its own area of the gallery space. I am visually struck by an installation of 101 receptacles on the far wall. The impression of the installation, from 10 metres away, is of a mini hanging garden of Hobart Town, in an arid-country sort of way. The indigenous plants appear to have been placed in a number of ceramic wall vases, all in different earthy shades and shapes.

The reality is quite different as in fact, each individual receptacle is a sacred heart, so shaped from old, found woollen blankets, individually dyed, and individually embroidered with the image of a different indigenous plant. The work is called Close To My Heart.

The other Installations in her exhibition depict the mountain in the four seasons, commencing in Autumn and moving through to Summer. The rendition of the forest floor in Autumn, on paper using native dyes, and drawn over with pastels, is simultaneously colourful, dark and mysterious. Its orange and yellow funghi seem immediately harvestable, and the green leaves seem to flutter in their space.

For Spring, Chantale has depicted Mt Wellington flowers, magnifying them in meticulous detail, to share the delicate structures and shapes of new growth on Milles Track.

The Winter series intrigues, with stark white snow peeping from out of winter greyness at The Pinnacles. In the sharply-angled vase in front of the exhibit, is snow melt, collected and preserved from The Pinnacles.

The holy water theme flows through each of the seasonal exhibits with clear vases, containing water from each of the seasons. There's water collected from the Disappearing Tarn in Spring, spring water from Summer and water from the Silver Falls at Fern Tree in Autumn

And then I realise! Each of these installations is a shrine to a different aspect of the natural environment.

Delrue's reverence for the Tasmanian environment is even more apparent when you learn of the many seasons she has spent distilling the essence of the mountain. And not just metaphorically. She has literally distilled its essence, collecting leaves, bark and flowers from native cherry, eucalypts, blackwood and wattle. At various stages of her process, she has brewed her recipes for hours or days, first creating the liquid essence over a bonfire, adding adherent for the paper. And then steeping her paper in baths of this native essence.

Her charcoals are collected from real fires in the bush, not Art Supply shops.

Chantale Delrue is not alone in revering the speci's not simply artistic, it's spiritual. (Even her food is lovingly home-grown and prepared. And she has shared one of her kitchen recipes with us!)

Naturally, the environment is also a must-experience for most visitors. And in my mind, artistic interpretations are a must-see. Numerous commercial galleries around the state provide a showcase for them.

While Chantale's Light and Shade exhibition is now over, you can see a selection of her work at Handmark Gallery in Hobart's Salamanca Place, or visit her website. Or visit Mount Wellington, to experience some of what Chantale has shown us through her interpretation of it.

When you visit Tasmania, of course, see it through your eyes. But also make sure you visit it through an artist's eyes. If you're really fortunate, see Tasmania from Chantale Delrue's point-of-view. It's close to her heart.