Moller sets mind to underwater wonders Vera Moeller with her painting Fringeflux and sculpture Zoolola. ARTIST and biologist Vera Moller hopes to raise awareness of the plight of the Great Barrier Reef when she takes up a position as artist-in-residence at the Heron Island Research Station next month. Melbourne-based Moller will spend a month on the island, off Gladstone in Queensland, where she hopes to be inspired by the reef and its inhabitants. "We have an influence and an effect on nature to an extent we have never had before, and what our philosophical positions and responsibilities might be has come into stark focus," she says. Moller's residency comes as a new exhibition of her work, Fringeflux, opens at Sydney's Olsen Irwin Gallery tomorrow. The artist says her work is inspired by real and imagined underwater worlds, which she describes as "poetically potent spaces . . . It's alien to us; we can't really go there and we can't really stay there, but it can also be seen as the topography of the unconscious. The works in her current show are a departure from the "hypothetical specimens" on which she has focused in recent years. Moller, who migrated from West Germany to Australia in 1986, has had a long-held fascination with underwater worlds. She says it began as a child when she read Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and led to her research interest in Bavarian lakes as a young scientist. The knowledge that I gained through those studies really gives me a vantage point from which I now approach everything that I do. Moller hopes to experiment on Heron Island with a variety of mediums -- "drawings, sculptures, photography projects or any medium I like" -- but it will be subject to an important constraint: her lifelong desire to experience scuba diving has proved elusive. I have always wanted to do a diving course from when I was a child playing on German beaches. It's been on my mind for a while, but to my great disappointment I failed the medical test because I smoked so much and I don't have the lung capacity. She resists making it sound too dramatic. Suffering would be grossly exaggerating how I feel. Besides, artists have always used their imagination to go into any space they like: that is their job. As a scientist and an artist, Moller acknowledges raising environmental awareness has its challenges. I cannot be dogmatic about it, as it turns people off straight away. All that you can do is to speak your mind, and to be informed. Fringeflux opens tomorrow at Sydney's Olsen Irwin Gallery and runs until October 27.