LOCAL artwork is now hanging on the walls of Swan Hill District Health’s recently renovated midwifery unit.
Paintings by Mallee artist Julie Chislett-Duffus pay homage to the unique landscape around Nyah, Vinifera and Boundary Bend.
“My art is inspired by the natural environment, especially the red gum forests of this area and particularly when those forests are in flood,” Ms Chislett-Duffus said.
“During floods the forests can have an other-worldly feel with more intense colour and light, which can be a challenge but also a joy to paint.”
Growing up in Boundary Bend, Ms Chislett-Duffus spent her childhood on her family’s farm by the river and riding ponies through the Nyah Forest.
“We spent a lot of time riding through forests and swimming ponies through flooded creeks and making cubbies in the bush,” Ms Chislett-Duffus said.
Ms Chislett-Duffus said her connection to the area is what influences her paintings and likens the local landscape to a companion.
“I don’t want to paint anything else or anywhere else,” she said.
“People sometimes say, ‘it would be great if you paint the High Country or rainforests’ and I think they’re beautiful but it’s not something that I would spend hours and hours and hours pouring my heart into.”
Ms Chislett-Duffus said that the feeling of that special connection is hard to describe, but finds meaning in a Welsh word called “hiraeth”.
“It sort of means a memory of lost places and nostalgia for lost times,” she said. “That word often comes to mind when I’m painting.”
Director of Clinical Services Chloe Keogh asked Ms Chislett-Duffus to hang her paintings on the newly painted walls of the Midwifery Unit.
Being displayed in the maternity ward means a lot to Ms Chislett-Duffus, who is also a midwife and maternal and child health nurse trained at Swan Hill District Health.
“I hope that the paintings will help contribute to a sense of calmness in the Midwifery Unit,” she said.
“I hope that people will value and understand how really blessed and special it is to live in a place like this and how unchanged most of it is.
“As a nurse, sometimes your tea breaks and lunch breaks are shorter than what they’re meant to be. So hopefully people can just zone out a bit when they look at the paintings.
“It would be great if people can feel the same feelings that tree or that place invoked in me at that moment in time.”
Swan Hill District Health’s midwifery unit was renovated on March with the help of fundraising efforts from volunteers at the Hospital Op-shop, which raised a total of $146,000.
The renovations included refurbished rooms and a new birthing suite which can operate 24/7.
