The Invitation
I’m honoured to share that I have been awarded support from Create NSW through the Next Steps Grant for my project Tracing the Living Floodplain — a travelling residency centred on the Murrumbidgee River and its living floodplains in the Riverina region. This will include spending time with the generosity of several regenerative farmers across the Riverina region, learning from their land management practices that shape healthy soils aiding floodplain health.
The grant support enables me to deepen a body of work that has been quietly forming over several years living beside the Clarence River: listening to how rivers shape landscape, and how human systems, in turn, reshape the river.
Tracing the Living Floodplain begins with a question:
How does a living river breathe within a landscape increasingly altered by human need?
Breath & Duration
Floodplains are living places of movement, loss and memory.
The river is ever-changing. Flows arrive, retreat, trickles to nothing and then surge. A dam release brings cold water and swollen levels. The river reshapes and returns.
Grasses live brief seasonal lives, while River Red Gums stand for centuries — holding time differently within the same landscape.
I am drawn to these overlapping rhythms of breath and duration, resilience and fragility — and to how drawing might record not only what a place looks like, but how it feels to move within it.
Paper is central to this work, not as a background surface but as a material collaborator with the river itself.
These materials are not applied to the surface but drawn into the body of the paper, where they alter the qualities of pencil and gouache worked later in the studio. The paper therefore becomes a tracing of surface and landscape, holding the ephemeral slippages of memory, time and loss carried through river systems.
Walking, listening and learning from the living floodplains along the Murrumbidgee and those who care for these landscapes will form the foundation of the work ahead.
Field Notes
Rather than a linear journey, this project feels like entering an ongoing conversation between river, land and community.
Sketches and drawings include fragments following the river — observations, experiments and moments where art and ecology meet.
I look forward to sharing these field notes as the journey unfolds.
With Gratitude,
Warmly, Rochelle
