GREEN VALLEY FARM

CLARE THACKWAY

6pm FRIDAY 19th OCTOBER 2012 - SATURDAY 24th NOVEMBER 2012

CCAS Gorman

Green Valley Farm is a regional holiday park located just outside the small country town of Tingha in northern New South Wales. Thackway’s paintings and documentary video inspired by her visit expose the freakish specimens sited at this peculiar ‘bush oasis’. The farm is home to playgrounds, waterslides and deformed animals. If you have ever wanted to see a five-legged sheep, Green Valley’s got one. The most interesting attraction of all, however, is the Smith Museum that was the first registered private gallery in Australia. Here the country curator showed Thackway the unique memorabilia collected over the years. Dead specimens are bottled up and preserved in methylated spirits; two-headed kittens, a headless lamb, an albino echidna and legless lizards. The highly detailed realism of Thackway’s paintings brings to life the cramped creatures. She preserves in paint, as the country curator has in methylated spir-its, the great stories and mysteries of these oddities that once lived. The documentary opens our eyes to a different definition of collecting and preserving to that of the traditional museum. Thackway shows us the great worth of these, at times amateur, methods that preserve regional memory. Green Valley Farm is a treasure for the proof its collections hold of these unfathomable beings.

Image: Claire Thackway, Green Valley Farm 1, 2010-2012, Oil on Board