Created by: Kim Walmsley with Chinchilla State School From: Australia

This decorated boomerang sculpture developed out of a yarn between artist Kim Walmsley and the students exploring their curiosities about the dynamics of time and air. With the upright Boomerang form also suggestive of sundial, the work is a contemplation on the forces of nature and their role in human tools and existence.

Without key elements such as air, water, earth, fire, tree and time, we would not exist. Each play a significant role in creating and maintaining balance. As we humans do. In the words of Chinchilla Traditional Owner Conrad Bauwens who was engaged in this work, “we look after nature; nature will look after us”

The boomerang represents the returning of breath. The link between our ancestors’ knowledge of keeping country and respecting the evolution of nature over 60,000 years. And in time, we will be nurtured by nature. The boomerang features designs created by the children in response to these concepts.

Reciprocity is part of The Schools Challenge Project which brings a youthful lens to the festival’s art/science program. Students from four selected Queensland schools are paired up with local artists to bring their creative and inquisitive artwork ideas to life. 

About the Creator

Kim Walmsley is a proud Mununjali woman living gratefully on the lands of the Jarowair, Wakka Wakka people. She embraced painting as a young girl, developing her art practice through the influences of her family, Aunties and elders. Using diverse mediums, Walmsley seeks to interpret her spirituality, experiences, stories of the dreamtime and place to create captivating art.

In addition to First Nations influences, her practice draws from broad sources including Ken Done boldness, Salvador Dali’s supernatural surrealism which she connects to her dreamtime, and Monet following an emotional encounter at Paris’s Muse de Orsay.

Walmsley believes everyone is born creative and can use art as a powerful tool for healing, education, imagining and celebrating the diversity that is the world and all it holds. Walmsley seeks to foster this process across any all settings, having worked on government, corporate, educational and community projects from a yarn under a tree, collaborative public artworks, moulding clay, to art therapy around a table.