Deb has spent the last year in a village in the south of Belize - a place she lived in 40 years ago. It is accessible only by water, bounded by mangrove forest, tropical rainforest and lowland savannah.

Home to around 200 people, it is made up of the same families she lived with all those years ago - now their children and grandchildren.

A traditional Creole village, she has been welcomed and loved, and is deeply grateful to have found her way back. Monkey River is not without its challenges. Ravaged by coastal erosion and increasingly severe storms - both a result of climate change - along with sand mining upriver and water extraction by coconut, banana and mango plantations inland, it has lost two streets of houses on the savannah edge of the village. The seascape is littered with old septic tanks and concrete remnants.

Early in her time there, she was asked to paint a sign - something she had been known for all those years ago. A flurry of signs followed: street signs for the village and a mural with the children at the school.

At the same time, she began painting again. Limited by materials and a 25-year hiatus, she had only a set of watercolours and three blocks of paper.

She has been mesmerised by the atmosphere - the clouds, the sea and the sky - so dynamic in comparison to the south of Australia.

There are years worth of observations from her front verandah, high on the edge of the Caribbean. It has been a true sabbatical - a reset of what is important, a reflection on the joy in daily life, and a small set of watercolours.

SIGNS

“Although there was a gap of 40 years since I had lived in the village, there was also a remembering and memory that revisited and reinterpreted our collective narrative of past times.

It was a collective memory of love of play and love of community that enabled our continuum to re-establish itself and keep going.”

— Deb Sleeman

Margie’s paintings and prints have most recently been made on the land and sea near the Great Australian Bight, halfway between South Australia and Western Australia. Her studio, tucked into a crook of Sceale Bay and facing a vast sea and sky, is where she has found comfort in recent years, finding time to reflect, invent and discover her new compositions of colour and space.

Initially a place of surfing and family - discovered and frequented by her late son - it has become a place of peace and rest, and somewhere to focus on her art practice, unobstructed by unnecessary complication and busyness.

Margie’s paintings and prints have most recently been made on the land and sea near the Great Australian Bight, halfway between South Australia and Western Australia. Her studio, tucked into a crook of Sceale Bay and facing a vast sea and sky, is where she has found comfort in recent years, finding time to reflect, invent and discover her new compositions of colour and space.

Initially a place of surfing and family - discovered and frequented by her late son - it has become a place of peace and rest, and somewhere to focus on her art practice, unobstructed by unnecessary complication and busyness.