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.