EMILY JACKSON

Getting outside is good for the soul. Through my artwork, I try to bring the outside in. Creating art that pays tribute to and celebrates the natural world nurtures my creativity and helps me reconnect with nature.
Multiple layers form my etchings, lino prints, drawings and painting are gathered to produce artworks that reflect the atmosphere of each location I visit and study.
I am an artist and graphic designer based in Margaret River, Western Australia.

CV
“A technically proficient and carefully rendered work, which presents a brightly coloured hope for the future, teeming with life. It is a work of precision, that reveals sound graphic skills. Third prize to Movement for Life by Emily Jackson.”
Ann Schilo. PhD.

Australia’s south-west: a hotspot for wildlife and plants
Southwest Australia is one of 25 original global hotspots for wildlife and plants, and the first one identified in Australia.

Since the first analysis identifying biodiversity hotspots in 2000, the list has expanded, and now 35 hotspots are recognised, two in Australia: the Southwest and the forests of east Australia.
Biodiversity hotspots are defined as regions “where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat”. As many as 44% of all species of native plants and 35% of all species in four animal groups are confined to the original 25 hotspots, which comprise only 1.4% of Earth’s land surface.
Australia was once part of the ancient continent Gondwana, which began to break up more than 154 million years ago. The region that supports the Southwest’s unique wildlife formed when India broke away from the supercontinent around 120 million years ago. While there are some young sand dunes, much of the southwest has been geologically undisturbed for tens of millions of years.
Southwest Australia, also known as the Kwongan, is, therefore, an old landscape with a stable climate. It has not seen glaciers or ice for more than 200 million years. This has allowed species to evolve without the major extinctions seen elsewhere in the world.
The region is about the size of England. England has about 1,500 species of vascular plants (all plants except ferns and mosses), 47 of them found nowhere else.
Contrast that with Southwest Australia, which harbours an astonishing 7,239 vascular plant species, almost 80% of which are found nowhere else in the world.

THE CONVERSATION 2016