Artists and musicians rally for Tasmanian bushfire relief

Artists and musicians have rallied to support victims of Tasmania’s, among them artists who have lost homes, studios and their work.
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Fires don’t discriminate, and fires of the scale and ferocity of the ones that devastated parts of southern Tasmania in early January were savagely indiscriminate. All victims have their stories to tell and their losses to suffer, but sometimes it seems even more poignant when an artist loses not only a home but a studio and all their work with it.

No one has counted the number of artists who were affected by the fires but there were many, Gay Hawkes among them. The artist/educator made functional/sculptural works in her boatshed studio at Dunalley, the town that Australia knew through the television news when a family found refuge there chin-deep in the water beneath a jetty. Gay Hawkes lost everything she had and made. Nothing was left of the life she had. Her works survive in Parliament House, Canberra, Australian National Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian War Memorial, Powerhouse Museum and other major collections around the country, but nothing remains of the work she was creating or the pieces she had kept for herself.

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