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John Wolseley: Dry and wet

JOHN WOLSELEY

John Wolseley

I like the idea that a given swamp or wetland contains within it the history of the world. As I paint these wetlands a sense of this history loomed in the back of my mind. A history of deep time which has been so beautifully revealed in the Vostok Core. This core of ice, several kilometres deep, is a vertical record of the changing conditions of the earth’s climate laid down over 400,000 years.

Here one can’ read’ the periods of hot and cold, and the glacial and interglacial times; and one can also see, repeated at intervals, the great swampy times, such as in the Carboniferous and Permian periods, when much of the world was damp and marshy.

The cycles of Deep Time, of dry / wet, desert / swamp are all there as rhythmic as a heartbeat. One gets a sense of how these conditions repeat themselves in a cycle of eternal return. There will be more swampy times, more glacial epochs. But because of what we are doing, releasing at an unprecedented rate the carbon laid down in those ancient Carboniferous swamps – we will almost certainly not be there to see them.

Roslyn Oxley with John Wolseley