The scenario makes her feel ill at ease, as do small daily changes in the weather which she worries could be ominous signs of a bigger shift in climate.

It's a concept that's at the centre of her solo show of rich, textured oil paintings at Beaver Galleries, her first in Canberra since 1992.

The Adelaide-born artist moved to Canberra in 1976 and worked as a School of Art lecturer at the Australian National University until 2003.

During the time, she established an environment studio and began embarking on a series of art and environment projects from 1995, a methodology she decided to pass on to her students.

"I paint and draw in the landscape. I literally take a crate of canvases or framed or stretched paper and a sketchbook," she says.

"Often it's too cold or too dark to paint, so I sketch. If the paint won't dry because it's too cold or humid, you can sketch at least.

"I'm pretty intimate with my material. You're right in there."

In 1996, she moved from Canberra to a property near Mandurama in central-west NSW and, soon after, a new neighbour arrived – the beginnings of what would become one of the world's largest gold mines.

As the crow flies, the gigantic underground and open-cut mines at Cadia are about 20 kilometres away, but visible from her studio and an influential presence in her work.

"We were very involved in the environmental impact survey and still are," she says. "We can see it clearly. You can see the trucks going back and forth."

She started a new series of environmental art projects at her Belubula River property, and the works fed into a larger body of work influenced by the central-west landscape, mining and climate change.

"I also developed a need to talk about the spiritual connection to landscape, what are the special places in landscapes," she says.

All the themes feature in her latest show, A Change in the Weather, which also includes works painted after visiting Western Australia's Lake Gregory near the Tanami Desert and others from during her 10th and ongoing environmental project in Arnhem Land.

While the landscape of Martin's NSW home is distinctively different from that of northern Australia, fire is an element both have in common, and appears frequently in her paintings.

"I'm really interested in fire and I have been for some time," she says. "I became really interested in cool burning and traditional burning.

"You're literally rubbing up against it, and getting it in your eyes and in your hair and smoke up your nose."

While some of her works show the "good" cool-burn fires used by Aboriginal people to cultivate the landscape and flush out feral animals for hunting, others show what happens when controlled fires turn into wildfires, such as one depicting a firefighter in front of the "mega fire" at Lithgow in 2013.

"You see all those images of people fighting something larger than life. These mega fires are almost a new phenomenon – really, they're so big," she says.

People from Arnhem Land have a "whole vocabulary" when it comes to fire and, through her work in the north, Martin helps to collect Indigenous testimony visually by encouraging them to paint.

With her son, Canberra artist and curator Alexander Boynes, she is now using the latest gaming technology to find a new way to record dreamtime stories.

Her own works, however, explore the feeling of unease when the initial plume of smoke is seen or when things in the landscape change.

"You watch a dust storm blowing in off Lake Eyre," she says, "and it's brought half the red sand from the centre of Australia right to your doorstep, and you think, `Is that a sign of climate change or is that something that's just happened cyclically in Australia for millennia? Are there more of them. Are they worse?'

"My feeling is climate change is really beginning to change the landscapes of Australia and this is a critical moment to witness those changes."

Extreme weather events such as the recent record snowfall in much of NSW pose questions about whether the event has occurred before.

"In European records, often the answer is no. In Aboriginal records, the answer is different, because they've been through climate changes before, but certainly not one that's as fast and induced by mankind as much as this one."

She knows there are still many people, especially in regional areas, who remain sceptical of climate change, seeing it as a "trendy city people" idea.

While she sees living in the country, with its space and lifestyle, as a "privilege", she hasn't ruled out returning to Canberra.

"I love Canberra and I'd come back here when we get too old and silly to farm," she says.

Mandy Martin's show, A Change in the Weather, is on at Beaver Galleries, Deakin, from September 3 to 22. For more information, see beavergalleries.com.au.