'Parallels' is an exhibition which presents both the pleasant images of native flora of the Perth coastal plain and other less optimistic images which can be found in the immediate Western Australian landscape.

It is, on the face of it, a very local and very topical show.  The most recent works are very recent indeed and relate closely to the current Regional Forests Agreement in context.  However, on close examination of this finely crafted exhibition of aesthetically beautiful and didactically displayed works, it is obvious that the show is universal in meaning and is the result of a long held attitude by an artist with a substantial, continuous and cohesive artistic practice.  Many of the images on cloth and paper refer back to the artist's work including photographs from a 1983 performance which have become fused into1993 commentaries about Perth and its coastal strip.

This is a show to be read slowly and carefully.  Text is a key element and in some works full and attributed ministerial and journalistic statements are imbedded in the image.  The simple message which recurs is that "incalculable mischief" has been wreaked on our landscape and that its effects can never be undone.

Sadly, because of the somewhat feral presentation of many environmentally responsible individuals, the worthwhile message often comes out in a manner which precludes an equally serious response from the movers and shakers of society.  This exhibition presents information about such issues in a distanced, objective but overall aesthetically significant manner.

I always have some worries about placing an undue emphasis on political content in art works, having seen too many examples where good politics don't necessarily make good art.  In the case of Haddy's exhibition, I have no difficulty in finding the works exceedingly engaging as art.  She has a long history of professional practice as a printmaker and this process based discipline shows in the way in which she has made artistic decisions and has developed an innovative methodology of printing and image transfer.

Entering the first upstairs gallery we see a series of small images of the urban desert contrasted with a moody Eden like pastoral scene.  The alienating landscape of a commercially driven aesthetic provides a chilling framework to entering the rest of the exhibition, which relates to both her personal history as a long time WA resident and the reality of WA today.

Haddy frequently uses parallel green lines in the background to provide something like a metaphor for the grid forms of an alienating modern city or suburban landscape.  Contrary to Renaissance perspective, parallel lines do not meet at infinity.  These lines appear below and behind many of the most powerful images of the show.  Sometimes the main structure of the piece is a word form in a kind of Daniel Burren meets Barbara Kruger context.  But this structure provides her with an enabling form to create a cohesive context for the groups of very evocative and poetic musings on the way things work at the end of the century.

In some works the text IS the image.  Truth and Lies is a punning piece that tells us that truth lies in its representation.  In other works, bouquets of floral tributes remind us of the flower forms now lost.  She recalls a favourite landscape, now lost, a walk on a favourite dune, now absorbed under the developers' vision made real estate.  She gives us the context of the importance of the river to the Perth landscape which cannot be underestimated, being as it is, our primary icon for the city and its people.  In the second large room soft fabric textile works pull the viewer seductively into an implied debate about events of concern to us all.

This very large body of work has been produced in a relatively short period of intense creative activity which gives it a cohesion normally lacking in an exhibition that addresses an artist's long standing concerns over 20 or more years.

These gentle graven images in our promised land should be looked at very closely as they remind us that only through art will we get a working map from which we can navigate through the landscape of truth and lies.