Narooma artist Cat Wilson's work 'Sky Eternal' is on exhibition in Canberra for the first time.
Ms Wilson trained in theatre, and when she decided to pursue individual art she wanted a medium that reflected the ephemeral and temporal nature of theatre. She wanted something repetitive, where the relationship between audience and artwork was constantly evolving and developing - like actors rehearsing a script over and over again.
She settled on time lapse.
"Time lapses let you slow down and speed up time and see things in a way humans could never really see on our own," Ms Wilson said.
"The camera is like a bit of a time machine."
She found time lapses showed patterns and natural rhythms an observer would never see otherwise, yet felt they were not, in and of themselves, evocative enough for art.
It was only when Ms Wilson moved to Morocco and studied geometric Islamic design that she thought to mirror and repeat patterns within time lapses to take away or amplify elements within a video.
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She began filming beautiful natural scenes around Narooma, not aiming to recreate nature, but the effect nature had on a person. She hopes her works inspire a form of meditation.
She became especially fascinated with the sky - what she sees as a metaphor for hope with heavenly symbolism.
"The sky provides a perspective of our place in the universe - humbling, comforting and inspiring - there is a sense of awe staring at the sky," Ms Wilson said.
She spent two years filming cloud movements across the Narooma sky, learning wind and weather patterns, how the sun reflected off different cloud types, and what looked best when fast forwarded at quadruple speed.
"I had to get it wrong a lot to get it right," she said.
Eventually, on a morning in April, the conditions were perfect, and Ms Wilson was able to film more than an hour of the clouds dancing above her head at Quota Park looking over Wagonga Inlet.
"When you watch cloud formations moving... it is epic," she said. "It is going on above us all the time whether we are paying attention or not."
The footage was sped up to 15 minutes, and accompanied by a soundscape composed by Jamie Saxe into an immersive art experience.
There are no cuts, no edits, just "an hour of the world," Ms Wilson said.
"Nature is the painter. I just tried to get out of the way as much as I could."
Sky Eternal is a large-scale immersive video installation. It is on exhibit at Photo Access in Canberra from June 30 to July 30.
