Award-winning artists to create new guardian

The River Guardian of the Clutha - Mata Au has long departed, but Wanaka artists Martin Hill and Philippa Jones will soon begin working on a reincarnation to watch over the largest man-made wetlands in the United States this month.

The award-winning artists are in Dallas, Texas, and were this week starting to create a new guardian of nature for the 809ha John Bunker Sands Wetland Centre, which supplies 340,687,060 litres of clean water a day to the city of Dallas.

The wetland is teeming with plants, birds and insects. It is regarded as a model for revolutionising water treatment through conservation practices and harnessing nature to address growing and critical demand for clean water in rapidly expanding urban environments.

The centre’s executive director Catriona Glazebrook said in a statement the artists were commissioned to help raise awareness of the wetland ecosystem.

Ms Jones said the couple were "perfectly in sync" with the centre’s solution to environmental challenges.

"Our plan is to create a sculpture gathering the plentiful bulrushes, or cattails as they term them in America, from the wetland to make a Guardian figure," she said.

"In New Zealand, our wetlands are host to a bulrush known as raupo and we have frequently used this material for sculpture making, the flowering stems providing straight sticks when peeled," she said.

Ms Jones and Mr Hills have been working together for more than three decades on their ephemeral sculptures, which are photographed before they disappear back into nature.

Many of their sculptures have featured circles and guardian figures in the landscape, made from snow, ice, driftwood and other natural materials.

A series of photographs of their Guardian sculptures won the international Fine Art Photography Awards in 2016. They also published a book, Fine Line, in 2022.

Mr Hill said their work had always been about mimicking the way nature worked.

The Dallas sculpture would be a guardian figure, on the edge of the vast wetland, overlooking the work plants were doing to filter water for Dallas.

"The sculpture itself will return eventually to nature as all our work does. The photograph is what remains," Mr Hill said.

The photograph would be presented at the wetland’s annual Wings Over Water event, before being auctioned to raise funds for the wetland’s education centre.

The artists would also exhibit photographs and videos of other projects, many of which were created in the Wanaka area.