The Earth Canvas art exhibition is about regenerative farmers

Farmers and artists have linked up for a new exhibition now showing in regional NSW. Meet the cattle farmer who came up with the concept.

Gill Sanbrook founded Earth Canvas, teaming up six artists with six regenerative farmers between the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers in southern NSW. Picture: David Geraghty

FARMERS and artists are not usual bedfellows.

Gillian Sanbrook — who has a 990ha cattle farm at Bowna, in the NSW Riverina — thinks otherwise.

“Most farmers say when they drive around their farm — ride on a horse or sit on a tractor — they become part of the land and feel that moment,” Gillian says.

“Likewise, artists feel where they are. It is similar.”

Such is the shared connection, two years ago Gillian founded Earth Canvas, teaming up six artists with six regenerative farmers between the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers in southern NSW.

Last year artists — who included such painters as John Wolseley, Jo Davenport and Idris Murphy — spent anywhere from a week to a couple of months capturing the landscape on their designated farm, which ranged from 4050ha to 600ha livestock and cropping properties.

The result is the Earth Canvas exhibition, currently showing at the Albury Library Museum until February 7, 2021, then touring nine other exhibitions in four states, including Mt Gambier, Swan Hill and Mildura, concluding at the Australian National Museum in Canberra, from August 18 to October 30, 2022.

The exhibition has 70 pieces, including paintings, prints, multimedia and photographs, with each of the subsequent nine exhibitions featuring a local farmer and artist, as well as talks from guests.

Picture: David Geraghty

Gillian — a climate champion and registered carbon farmer — says the exhibition follows a series of field days and workshops also held last year and open to the public, which had artists on farms, alongside discussions from speakers.

“I think the power from Earth Canvas is in the consumer and artists especially attract city people,” she says. “It’s the consumer who is saying they have had enough of the industrial farm system, already seen in pigs and chickens and currently moving to sentiments around feed lots, and from there it’s going to the landscape.

“It’s part of a broader wave.”

Gillian studied a diploma of farm management at Glenormiston, which involved two years as a jillaroo on a Merino sheep stud in the Riverina. She later became a publicist for Merino breeders in South Africa, where she lived for four years.

Returning to Australia she met her then husband David Taylor, and together they ran “one of the top studs in Australia”, Pooginook Merino Stud at Jerilderie, at its peak farming 6000 breeding ewes.

It was here Gillian first encountered the work of Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory and his holistic management practices. Gillian considers Savory to be one of her mentors, alongside Australian Peter Andrews who pioneered natural sequence farming.

For 13 years Gillian has managed her Bowna cattle property to regenerative farming practices, which she defines as “building the ecology of the landscape”.

“Regenerative farming is not prescriptive,” she says. “It can be holistic management or permaculture.

“For me it’s about managing stock numbers to rainfall and the amount of grass in the paddock.

Painter John Wolseley. Picture: UWA Publishing

“Most farmers realise they are at the mercy of nature. We live by the climate and so our biggest resource is the environment.

“When you buy land you are buying in to nature and so we have to be aware of building natural capital, and from that the economic benefits come.”

Gillian has also long been immersed in the arts, last year winding up a decade-long project called Artstream Albury, learning about art by investing in it.

It was one of her arts contacts who years ago told her “artists need to do more about climate change”, which spawned the idea for Earth Canvas.

The regenerative farmers who have taken part in Earth Canvas are mostly from a local farming body called 8 Families, who meet every six weeks as a farmer support and knowledge-sharing group.

“Earth Canvas has been a tremendous learning experience for both artists and farmers,” Gillian says. “They had the joy of having an artist on their farms and for the artists they met landholders concerned about the environment, because there is a perspective in the community that farmers degrade the landscape.”

Gillian says one of the messages she wants the exhibition to send is that regenerative farming can be done on a broad, commercial scale and “can feed the world”.

“It’s a matter of farmers getting their heads around it,” she says. “It can take a few years to wean off chemical inputs but increasingly there’s no excuse to say it’s not possible.”

● earthcanvas.com.au or 8families.com

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