If the public is increasingly starting to realise that climate change is real and a threat to our very existence, for artists it has long been the defining issue of our generation.

Annie Franklin has been an environmentally motivated artist for most of the 30 years that she has been exhibiting. She came from a printmaking background and burst onto the stage with her vibrant political posters defending Aboriginal land rights and our fragile ecosystems.

Over the years, she has developed a miniaturist technique, in this exhibition working primarily in gouache on panel with a surface varnish, and holistic approach.

On seeing her work, there is a fair amount of eye candy - beautifully worked landscape elements in vibrant brilliant colours - but this is supplemented by a considerable dose of high-pitched protest concerning an environment that is under threat. As an ecological warrior, Franklin is a gentle lyricist who consciously sets out to hook the viewer into the work through its poetic beauty and then with power and defiance she asserts a sobering reality check.

Franklin's glowing little gems narrate environments that she has come to know intimately. She lives at Lake Wapengo in the Bega Valley Shire, NSW. Frequently she would travel to Canberra through Bega along the Monaro Highway and one series of paintings traces this journey through a well-known and much-loved landscape. She observes in her artist statement, "The paintings in this exhibition are about the variety, the importance, the fragility, the light, the sound, the colour, the birds and the bees, the seasonal moods, the diversity and the relevance of this threatened landscape."

The beauty of the work, at least in part, lies in the intimacy that the artist establishes with her subject - as one artist said to me, you can only establish a oneness with the landscape when you can hear the ants walk. Franklin not only listens to the ants but, if you look very closely at many of her paintings, you can see the little ants and various other insects crawling along the bottom edge.

In one glorious painting, First light, last morning (2019), Franklin depicts a much-loved tree that she has known from childhood, that through various family circumstances she is unlikely to ever see again. There is a majestic beauty and grandeur, a currawong in the foreground spreads its wings, while on the bottom edge the insect procession is shown in its solemn march. It is a fragile environment, a threatened environment and a loved environment.

In Summer shadows, Mount Majura (2019), Franklin succeeds where many artists fail, showing vividly a drought-stricken landscape without resorting to clichés and pompous overstatements. In her familiar landscape on this specially shaped panel, the birds, the insects, the grasses and the trees are all struggling for survival yet a sensuous beauty still prevails and pleads with us to hear its call and to step away from our path of self-destruction.

The call of the currawong reminds the artist of her childhood spent in Canberra and, like the music of childhood, it forever remains locked in our spirit. However, the currawong call for Franklin is not only an evocation of her childhood, but also a call to arms to confront and respond to the devastation that climate change is bringing to our world.