In late morning, I cycled to Riverway Arts Centre in Pioneer Park, lured by the prospect of an exhibition of Environmental Art at the free-to-the-public Pinnacles Art Gallery. Feeling as though I’m surrounded by environmental art every day – rainbow bee-eaters and lorikeets being cases in point – I was curious as to the subjects and media the exhibition would contain.

While cycling, I noted the tawny tinge of parkway lawns speckled with foraging nutmeg mannikins, and the yellow-streaked vegetation of tidal lagoons bordering the Ross River that during the wet were so lushly green. City park workers blowing leaves from the path and trimming tree branches courteously stepped out of my way, the tree-limbers hurriedly clearing away mounds of leafy, severed branches so I could cycle on through. In Pioneer Park, mothers of toddlers parked strollers in the shade and sat on the grass with their wee ones, enjoying Townsville’s winter warmth without the blazing intensity of the summer sun.

Within the gallery, I learned that the exhibition, titled Waters’ Edge – creating environments, consisted primarily of photographs of actual installations, all of which had been temporary constructions in the natural world. Like all Environmental Art, the installations had incorporated natural materials already present at each particular site, along with evidence of human/environmental interactions. For example, in Pam Lane’s Drift bottle no. 0852, the artist positioned bits of ocean debris such as shards of hard plastic, as well as several drift bottles, among the spiky aerial roots of mangroves protruding from Cockle Bay, Magnetic Island.

In another garbage-inspired display, Ngaio Lenz arranged scraps of flotsam wood gathered from Mackay beaches into a shoreline installation at Cape Hillsborough that featured a precise arrangement of weathered wood, some bearing faded paint, numbers, or letters. Continuing with the recycling theme, Susan Doherty wrapped water-smoothed stones with strips of brightly-coloured recycled cloth and placed the stones in circular or semi-circular patterns on the sand at Cow Bay for Genetically Coded. In her work Trace, featured artist and exhibition coordinator Jill Chism echoed the seams of quartz in shoreline granite at Oak Beach by arranging narrow lines of vertically-positioned bits of ocean-transported plastic junk in shades of white, yellow, pink, and blue.

Not all the exhibition pieces carried the theme of recycling or the ocean as transporter of human garbage. Tijn Meulendijks wrapped pointed, oval bundles of rainforest leaves and twigs in twine and placed them on the rainforest floor in a thick, snaking curve that could have been a river. Jill Chism introduced ‘healing’ components into some of her works, notably red or white acupuncture needles inserted in straight rows or curves in lily pads, plant stems, and among mosses in Chi for Gaia #1 at Cape Tribulation Beach.

In Preserve/Conserve – an invocation, Chism spelled out a conservation message using sea salt on the dark sand of Cape Hillsborough National Park, encircling rocks and sweeping around outcrops in mandala-like patterns. Conserve. Preserve. Sea grasses. Dugong. Dolphin. Shark. The repetitive patterns of words, recreated in a small sample on the gallery floor, carried in them the essence of chanting an appeal to humanity for the preservation of North Queensland marine ecosystems.

Intrigued, I cycled home in brilliant winter sun and fresh breezes, wishing I could have seen the original installations. I would have enjoyed stumbling across that rainforest river of tied leaf pods, or scrambling about on shoreline rocks and encountering those white words wending around rocky obstacles in an ephemeral message containing a whole lot of salt.