Bec Denholm BINX DESIGNS - Winner of Flood Tee Graphic
Where are you based and how has the floods personally impacted you?
So I am currently based in South Golden Beach (just above Brunswick Heads). I moved up here from my little country town in the Riverina in about May last year, really just in search of more creative traction with my art and design work overall. The flooding in this area was quite full on, as it came to about chest height in my street with many people canoeing around trying to save what they could.
I am fortunate enough to have a Campervan to escape in, so I actually evacuated before the water itself got too high. Putting everything in my art studio (which was on the bottom floor of my house) up high off the ground on table tops, packing a bag, grabbing my dogs and heading for higher ground. After 3 days I returned home to find every door swollen out of shape, mud and leeches all over the floor and my art studio in absolute ruins. No one could’ve anticipated it coming in that high, so all the prep work I did really didn’t make much of a difference after all. 10 years of work, memories, accreditations, products for a website I was working on – everything was gone. As well as my little run around car and everything else in my garage too. It’s been difficult, but we are also very fortunate not to have lost absolutely everything, and my heart really goes out to everyone who has.
Your view on the community? Has it changed since the disaster?
I haven’t been living here an incredibly long time, almost a year in total, but I always felt like the community here were generally nice, friendly people who were always up for a chat at the dog beach or farmers markets. However seeing such a big scale disaster hit everybody this way, its been another level of kindness all together. Neighbours were updating us on water levels, dropping us fans and gurneys making trays of food and offering them around the suburb as we helped each other clean and sort. I've also seen the community Facebook pages light up with offers of accomodation, supplies, food, even just simple things like washing or ironing peoples clothes for them. It makes me quite emotional every time I see it actually and something that will certainly stay with me for a long time to come too. This community is full of big hearted people and it shows.
The energy that went into the design and what does the design mean to you?
Helping people out where we can has been a priority for both me and my partner, however when I saw this competition pop up I really felt called to enter because not only was I impacted personally, but it felt like a perfect chance to actually use my specific skills to help make a difference, and thats a really great feeling during such a difficult time. After weeks spent on this immense clean up, I don’t think i will ever look at another bucket (among other things) quite the same way ever again. It was something I looked at and used every day, water started out clean and ended up filthy, so I wanted to incorporate that imagery into my design somehow. Then for me, the saying ‘many hands make light work’ also felt very relevant here, so it's really a reflection of all these helping hands coming in, working in tandem, supporting this cause and turning something really heavy into something very moving and meaningful -–inspiring a bit of hope that so many of us need right now.
SUPPORT THE NORTHERN RIVERS
If you want to support us in raising money for the Northern Rivers communities impacted by the floods, you can buy our Arnhem Community Spirit Charity tee until Wednesday the 30th of March, 2022.
Join us in raising funds for our community and giving it to the people who truly need it.
100% of profits go to GIVIT.
*Tees will ship mid July
THANK YOU TO ALL ARTISTS WHO ENTERED
A big, heartfelt, THANK YOU to all Artists who submitted their works. We were overwhelmed by over 100 spectacular entries...
A sample of these are visible here: #Arnhem4OurCommunity
