Wetlands is a collaboration between painter Deborah DeWit and filmmaker Carl Vandervoort, an hour-long documentary film. It tells the story of a year in the studio and a year in a small piece of the natural world–the site of a former dairy farm, a “postage-stamp wilderness” surrounded by suburbia, adjacent to a sewage treatment plant–which has been both her inspiration and a major subject of her work since the early 2000s. DeWit's voice weaves the narrative thread, her paintings provide many of the visuals, and her ideas about art and life the form the philosophical core of this story. Alongside this aesthetic approach to exploring our need for nature Wetlands examines the scientific and social aspects of the restoration process, the goal of which is to enhance and protect our native habitat. Portraying a year of seasonal and artistic changes, Wetlands explores themes of the artistic impulse, the internal process of art making, and the nexus of nature and art. The film juxtaposes DeWit’s feelings of responsibility as an artist to use her creativity to explore truths of the natural experience with the voices of environmental activists, citizens and restoration workers, all of whom address the theme of the value of encountering, preserving and enlarging the “wild” world.
Wetlands is the story of a journey. The need to create art has been a subtle and pervasive impulse through human history. And our relationship with the natural world, in these times of human population explosion, global environmental crises and reassessment of resource use/allocation, has finally come to a central place in our consciousness. The goal of this film is to find and illuminate threads of connection between these themes, to entertain and inform, and to encourage viewers to find their own paths to creativity in the ways they find inspiration from and how they in turn impact nature.