River Song - Ghost Water

Archivally float mounted and tray framed in Mountain Ash in Japan Black stain and wax finish.

As a painter and photographer Michael Wolfe draws inspiration from the landscape around his home in Castlemaine, Victoria. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally and his work is included in public, corporate and private collections.

Let’s say you lived on the driest continent on earth where rainfall was unpredictable with drought followed by deluge; where water was a precious and valuable resource, especially as the population grows and climate change worsens.
What if you came up with a plan to buyback water harvested by farmers so this water could go back into the river systems as environmental flows. So far, so good.
Let’s say this was flood water; water that could only be collected when the land it fell on was inundated and let’s say the rain hadn’t fallen yet, it was a promise of rain, an IOU.
Let’s say this forward estimate of volumes – an unsubstantiated guess – was so grotesquely overinflated there was virtually no chance of any water going back into the river systems - ever.
A ghostly, elusive memory that feels more like a loss than an absence.

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Michael has had over 40 solo exhibitions, numerous group shows, been included in the 2019 Castlemaine State Festival with the exhibition ‘Shimmer’, the 2020 contemporary landscape survey show (Con)textural Landscapes at Bendigo Art Gallery with Ben Quilty, Rosalie Gascoigne, Rover Thomas; 2022/23 National Portrait Gallery Prize touring exhibition and collaborated with renowned Australian author Alex Miller in the international collab project and exhibition Now&Them in Shanghai China.

His 2022 exhibition, a collaboration with writer Kirsten Krauth and lyrics by Nick Cave, Someone To Watch Over Me – The Better Angels of Our Nature, was part of St Kilda Writer’s Week, Ballarat International Photo Biennale and International Poetry Day.

Michael’s exhibition of 20 portraits of artists over 70 ‘twenty/seventy’ was held at Castlemaine Art Museum in 2024, with an accompanying documentary and radio series.

He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally and his work is included in public, corporate and private collections.