, Sweden]] and Lowell, Indiana.]] Rural areas are large and isolated areas of an open country with low population density. The terms "countryside" and "rural areas" are not synonyms: a "countryside" refers to rural areas that are open. Forest, wetlands, and other areas with a low population density are not a countryside.

About 91 percent of the rural population now earn salaried incomes, often in urban areas. The 10 percent who still produce resources generate 20 percent of the world’s coal, copper, and oil; 10 percent of its wheat, 20 percent of its meat, and 50 percent of its corn. The efficiency of these farms is due in large part to the commercialization of the farming industry, and not single family operations.

United States

Today, 80 percent United States' inhabitants live in suburban and urban areas, but cities occupy only 2 percent of the country. Rural areas occupy the remaining 90 percent.;USDA:* The USDA's Office of Rural Development may define rural by various population thresholds. The 2002 farm bill (P.L. 107-171, Sec. 6020) defined rural and rural area as any area other than (1) a city or town that has a population of greater than 50,000 inhabitants, and (2) the urbanized areas contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town.:* The rural-urban continuum codes, urban influence codes, and rural county typology codes developed by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) allow researchers to break out the standard metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas into smaller residential groups.

Rural schools

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) revised its definition of rural schools in 2006 after working with the Census Bureau to create a new locale classification system to capitalize on improved geocoding technology and the 2000 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) definitions of metro areas that rely less on population size and county boundaries than proximity of an address to an urbanized area. The new classification system has four major local categories— city, suburban, town, and rural —each of which is subdivided into three subcategories. Cities and suburbs are subdivided into the categories small, midsize, or large; towns and rural areas are subdivided by their proximity to an urbanized area into the categories fringe, distant, or remote. These twelve categories are based on several key concepts that Census uses to define an area's urbanicity: principal city, urbanized area, and urban cluster. Rural areas are designated by census as those areas that do not lie inside an urbanized area or urban cluster. NCES has classified all schools into one of these twelve categories based on schools' actual addresses and their corresponding coordinates of latitude and longitude. Not only does this mean that the location of any school can be identified precisely, but also that distance measures can be used to identify town and rural subtypes.�

Rural health

Rural health definitions can be different for establishing underserved areas or health care accessibility in rural areas of the United States. According to the handbook, Definitions of Rural: A Handbook for Health Policy Makers and Researchers, “Residents of metropolitan counties are generally thought to have easy access to the relatively concentrated health services of the county’s central areas. However, some metropolitan counties are so large that they contain small towns and rural, sparsely populated areas that are isolated from these central clusters and their corresponding health services by physical barriers.� To address this type of rural area, “Harold Goldsmith, Dena Puskin, and Dianne Stiles (1992) described a methodology to identify small towns and rural areas within large metropolitan counties (LMCs) that were isolated from central areas by distance or other physical features.�  This became the Goldsmith Modification definition of rural. “The Goldsmith Modification has been useful for expanding the eligibility for federal programs that assist rural populations—to include the isolated rural populations of large metropolitan counties.�

United Kingdom

In Britain, "rural" is defined by the government Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), using population data from the latest census, such as the United Kingdom Census 2001. These definitions have various grades, but the upper point is any local government area with less than 26% of its population living in a market town ("market town" being defined as any settlement which has permission to hold a street market).

Rural health

An NHS patient is defined as rural if they live more than from either a doctor or a dispensing chemist. This is important for defining whether the patient is expected to collect their own medicines. While doctors' surgeries in towns will not have a dispensing chemist, instead expecting patients to use a high-street chemist to purchase their prescription medicines, in rural village surgeries, an NHS dispensary will be built into the same building).

See also

References

Further reading

# Thomas C. Ricketts, Karen D. Johnson-Webb, Patricia Taylor. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Rural Health Research Program, Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, University of North Carolina, 1998. 13 p.

External links

e-Agriculture promoting rural development

Census 2000 Urban and Rural Classification

Center for Rural Affairs

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Measuring Rurality

Navigating Resources for Rural Schools

North West Rural Affairs Forum (England)

Rural America

Rural Information Center

Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin

Canadian Rural Partnership

Category:City Category:Ecology Category:Human habitats Category:Rural society Category:Rural culture Category:Rural economics Category:Rural geography

Tracey Moffatt (born 12 November 1960) is an Australian artist who primarily uses photography and video.

Born in Brisbane in 1960, she holds a degree in visual communications from the Queensland College of Art, graduating in 1982.

Her works are held in the collections of the Tate, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Gallery of Australia, and Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Photography

Tracey Moffatt first came to prominence in the Australian art world with her series Something More. Commissioned in 1989 by the Albury Regional Art Gallery and shot in the Link Studios in Wodonga, the series set the tone and themes of much of her later work. In a sequence of nine images, Something More is a loose narrative in which the artist puns on the possible meanings of the title and its veiled references to sadomasochism.

In the first image of the series Something More #1 Moffatt appears in the centre of frame in an Asian dress set against a hut in which a woman in a white dress leans against the door. Two children look on and a man in a coolie hat is seen in the background. The backdrop is painted and the image has the look of a film set. Moffatt's image seeks to confuse and disturb meanings of cultural identification while questioning the authenticity of the presentation by reinforcing its own 'fake' construction. The subsequent images in the series present variations on these ideas.

Moffatt's photographic series of works such as Pet Thang (1991) and Laudanum (1998) returned to the themes of Something More exploring mixed and sometimes obscure references to issues of sexuality, history, representation and race. Other series of images, notably Scarred for Life (1994) and Scarred for Life II (1999) again tackled these themes but which took the form of book or magazine illustrations with captions offering ironic and humorous commentaries on the images..

As her work progressed over the next decade, Moffatt began to explore narratives in more gothic settings. In Up in the Sky [1998] the artist's work again used a sequential narrative but instead of using fantasy settings, a story concerning Australia's "stolen generation" - Indigenous Australian children who were taken from their families and forcibly relocated under Government policy - was enacted and performed on location in Queensland's outback. In Invocations (2000) Moffatt used a non-specific locale for an ambiguous psychodrama which recalled Southern American fiction and fantasy films of the early 20th Century.

In 2000, Moffatt's work was amongst those by eight individual or collaborative groups of Indigneous Australian artists included in a major exhibition of Australian Indigenous art held in the prestigious Nicholas Hall at the Hermitage Museum in Russia. The exhibition received a positive reception from Russian critics, one of whom wrote:

This is an exhibition of contemporary art, not in the sense that it was done recently, but in that it is cased in the mentality, technology and philosophy of radical art of the most recent times. No one, other than the Aborigines of Australia, has succeeded in exhibiting such art at the Hermitage.

Moffatt's work since 2000 has retreated from specific locales and subject matter and become more explicitly concerned with fame and celebrity. Her series Fourth [2001] used images of sportspeople from the 2000 Summer Olympic Games coming fourth in their various competitions. Seeking to underline their outsider status, the images are treated so only the ignoble fourth place holder is highlighted.

2003 saw Moffatt named by Australian Art Collector magazine as one of the country's 50 most collectible artists.

Adventure Series [2004] is Moffatt's most unabashed fantasy series using painted backdrops, costumes and models [including the artist herself] to enact a soap opera like drama of doctors, nurses and pilots in a tropical setting. Under The Sign of Scorpio [2005] is a series 40 images in which the artist takes on the persona of famous women born - like the artist - under the zodiac sign of Scorpio. The series reiterates the artist's ongoing interests in celebrity, alternate personas and constructed realities. Moffatt's 2007 series Portraits explores the idea of 'celebrity' among people in her immediate social circle - family members, fellow artists, her dealer - through 'glamorized' renderings of their faces using computer technology, repetitive framing and bright colors.

Films and video work

Moffatt's work in film and video has included short films, experimental video and a feature film. The short films rely on the stylistic genre features of experimental cinema - usually including non realist narrative scenarios often shot on sound stages echoing her work in still photography. Early works such as Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries also use sound mixes that reinforce the 'fakeness' of the settings and use well-worn experimental cinema devices such as audio field recordings and low tones to provide atmosphere. Her short video works such as Artist [2000] use the cut up methodology of taking images from pre-existing sources and re-editing them into ironic commentaries on the material - Artist for example providing a commentary on the cliched role of the artist in Hollywood cinema, and her Doomed [2007] - made in collaboration with the artist Gary Hillberg - a collection of scenes of destruction from disaster movies. Her feature film Bedevil is a trio of narratives themed around spirits and hauntings.

"Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy" [1989]

Primarily concerned with a series of almost static vignettes, Night Cries reiterates many of Moffatt's visual motifs from her still photography - sets, non-acting, an evocative use of sound and music. In Night Cries Moffatt's attempts to draw ironic or romantic connotations in juxtaposition to the images and narratives, such as her use of Jimmy Little. Moffatt also makes explicit references to Australian art history, drawing parallels between Indigenous history and the recording the landscape by non-Indigenous artists by quoting artists such as Frederick McCubbin's The Pioneer. This film was selected for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990.

"Bedevil" [1993]

Shown at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, Bedevil is composed of three self-contained narratives with recurring visual motifs. In the first story Mister Chuck Moffatt uses the character of an American soldier, in the second part Choo Choo Choo Choo railway tracks connect a series of events and in the final part Lovin' the Spin I'm in a landlord who evicts a family from a house. The images were partly inspired by memories from her early life.

"Heaven" [1997]

In Moffatt's film, Heaven, footage of men getting changed in a car park near a beach is collected together, the film maker taking the position of a voyeur.

"Lip" [1999]

In Lip, Moffatt collates clips of black servants in Hollywood movies talking back to their 'bosses', attempting to expose the attitudes to race often found in mainstream cinema.

"Artist" [2000]

Tracey Moffatt's Artist is a collection of clips from movies and television programs that depict artists at work, at play and in the act of creation. By showing the particular bias of television and cinema to what the role of an artist apparently means to modern society, the film reflects the sometimes uninformed, sometimes humorous view of society towards artists today. She shows a clip from The Agony and The Ecstasy with Michelangelo destroying his first painting in the Sistine Chapel, a comic scene from the movie Batman with Rembrandts and Degas paintings being vandalised by the 'Joker' and a scene from the television show Absolutely Fabulous, as well as other scenes from art movies such as Surviving Picasso.

"Revolution" (2008)

Shown at Australian art gallery in New South Wales.

References

Category:Australian photographers Category:Australian experimental filmmakers Category:Indigenous Australian people Category:Australian Aboriginal artists Category:1960 births Category:Living people Category:Australian women artists