A painter is seeking reality in the virtual

—Ashley Crawford

For an artist whose work pushes the boundaries of the high-technology world of virtual reality, Char Davies has a rather odd obsession: nature.

Davies's spectacular installation Ephémère - featuring in Transfigure, a group exhibition on display at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square - is a mind-boggling trip into virtual reality. There are two distinct experiences here. The first is that of passive observer, watching a screen version of Davies's world and the shadow of an individual in full VR gear traversing her strange landscapes. The second is becoming an actual part of Ephémère - donning the VR helmet and flying through Davies's grainy multi-coloured landscape.

Ephémère and Davies's other work on show, Osmose, are immersive virtual environments with stereoscopic 3D-computer graphics, spatialised sound and real-time interaction colouration. Talking to the Canadian-born, San Francisco-based Davies, it would be fair to expect a dazzling discussion about the merits of high end technology, an endless fascination with computer graphics, virtual worlds and bits and bytes. But the conversation instantly veers in another direction.

"Do you know anything about the Tarkine Rainforest in Tasmania?" she asks. "I'm going there on Sunday."

The Tarkine is one of the most significant temperate rainforests in Australia, if not the world. However, in June last year, the moratorium that had protected the Tarkine for more than 20 years was lifted. Preparations for logging operations covering 177,000 square kilometres are under way.

"When I first got out of university as a young painter I ended up in a really remote logging camp on Vancouver Island," Davies says. "I did a drawing of one of the loggers and he offered to pay me, so that's how I made a living, doing commissioned portraits of the loggers. One of them brought me a photograph of a cedar he was going to cut down, it must have been 15 feet across. I said 'you must want me to paint you with it?', but he said 'no, I want a portrait of the tree'.

"So many of those guys were working in the woods because they loved the woods and these guys were making a living killing what they loved. That really politicised me. If you fly over Vancouver Island now, there's nothing left."

Her work is not about technology, Davies says vehemently. "Talking about Tasmania is totally relevant to my work," she says. "It's not about the technology, it's about using that particular media to explore the ideas and communicate the things I want to express."

Davies says it is important to recognise that her work has developed from being a painter, particularly a landscape painter. "My whole sense of colour comes from painting and what those colours can express. I think I approach the world as a painter," she says.

"I remember times, especially on Vancouver Island in the early '80s when I would go out alone along the logging roads and I would paint outside. I remember the weight of the solitude would almost crush you."

In a statement for her show Davies writes of her interest "in conveying a sense of being enveloped in an all-encompassing, all-surrounding space, a subjective embodied experience".

As an artist, I am interested in recreating a sense of lived, felt space that encircles one with an enveloping horizon and presses closely upon the skin, a sensuous space, subjectively, bodily, perceived. Some might interpret this as a uterine or womb-like space."

Davies says the desire to convey that spatial envelopment is what led her to abandon painting in the mid-1980s for 3D computer technology. She hoped the new technologies would free her from the limitations of the two-dimensional picture plane.

"Once I was making images with 3D software, I wanted to bring my audience with me into that space," she says. "So I turned to the medium of immersive virtual space - or what many people call virtual reality."

Although for cutting-edge aficionados, the VR helmet is a clunky relic from the past, for Davies the all-enveloping, immersive aspect of virtual reality, is only possible with a head-mounted display at this point.

Osmose and Ephémère are immersive and interactive virtual reality environments. These works have become known internationally for their immersive interface, painterly aesthetic and themes of nature. They are the most recent fruits of an artistic project Davies has worked on for almost 20 years, encompassing painting, film and 3D computer graphics and animation.