Sculptural wall drawing

A flake of rust from the barbie at Wanstead reserve, a casuarina seed cone, a Sydney cockle shell, a piece of plastic from the lid of a water bottle. Collected on a series of walks along the Cook’s River, from Yagoona to Botany Bay, these small silver objects reflect a desire to draw attention to the river and to consider things around us that are easy to overlook. These sculptures were cast as mnemonic tools for a walk on the river in 2019. Each walker took one home to put on their bookshelf, forget in their pocket or lose down the back of their couch, only to see it again at some point and remember being a part of a group of people walking along the river. These sculptures and walks are a part of an ongoing body of work called A Week on the Cooks River.

I intended to present the silver castings in a circle and draw the river catchment on the wall of the gallery in graphite. Following the week-long drawing I did on the walls of Sydney College of the arts, I noticed that without the bridges, suburb names and compass points, an aerial map of the river is the shape of water. Like veins, like lightning, like a leaf.

I also observed that a drawn map of a river is inadequate because lines on a page (or wall) have a certainty, that water doesn't. We know that, particularly in Australia, water dries up, and it changes course, floods. Lines on a page, imply much more certainty than that. Considering my observation that static drawings of the river don't reflect the nature of the water in it, I started working with images of the river in flood.

I noticed this beautiful line where the water came up over the riverbank and has found its own edge. I took a sheet of acetate and traced the line that the river made on its own. I projected that onto the wall and installed the silver objects following that edge.

The work is a sort of drawing of the river and the flood.

Concertina Artist Book

This concertina artist's book pulls together first-person writing from the research process. The book is printed in a long folding line and follows the river from Graf Park, Yagoona to Botany Bay.

Video, sound and rocking chairs

The chairs are pipe metal chairs salvaged from Sydney College of the Arts Callan Park Campus mounted on pine rockers. These chairs were developed in the old Sydney college of the Arts workshop and in the new one and create a link between, Sydney College of the Arts as it was, and as it is now. The chairs are inspired by the movement of being in a boat on the water. They are intended to give the audience the feeling of an unstable, but reliable foundation.

Approaching the work, the audience turns either towards the sculptural wall drawing, the video or the print. I think of this movement like the tidal movement of the water - situating the audience as bodies of water themselves.

The underwater video is a 25-minute edit of footage that follows the Cooks River from Strathfield to Botany Bay. The footage bears witness to the river's concreted and mangrove beds, shopping trolleys, stagnant water, plastic, a car, jellyfish and the river's deep and salty water as the boat approaches Botany Bay. The sound marries the in-camera audio of the video recordings with extended piano chords. This footage and observations about the physicality of rocking on the water were developed following the river from Yagoona to Botany Bay.

There is choreographic potential in the chairs themselves, and in the way that the audience move in relationship to them.

Pigment print on archival paper

Artist Matt Prest took this photo. When you are rowing, you are moving forward and looking back. That dynamic is expressed in this photo and something that has informed the way that I've worked. Drifting, looking back, moving forward and working in relationship to the planes, cranes and industry of Botany Bay.