ART INSIGHTS Creating Wealth as a Successful Artist - John Dahlsen

tradition of exploring the relation betweenhumankind and the environment throughdaily, ritual, embodied interaction.In the case of Dahlsen’s practice, however,the ecological dimension was more explicit,for during these saunterings along thecoast of his local area in Northern NSW, theartist would collect the flotsam and jetsamwashed up on the shore. Unlike Long’sengagement with the natural environment,Dahlsen was actively harvesting from‘nature’ the many- times-removed productsof human manufacture: the raw materialextracted from the earth, processed intocommodity, used, discarded, and returnedby the tide to human use.For a time, the very act of walking andcoastal care comprised Dahlsen’s work,recalling not only Long’s land art, but alsoother environmental-conceptual worksthat focused on the cleaning and caretakingof everyday environments. (Theseinclude the works of Merle Lader Ukeles,whose performances entailed sweeping,159