As part of my artist residency project Tracing the Living Floodplain, I spent my first week working along the Marrambidya (Murrumbidgee River) at Wagga Wagga; walking, sketching, returning, and beginning to work in rhythm with the river. It’s something understood slowly, through time spent in place.
Yarra—the Wiradjuri name for River Red Gums—are shaped by water, flood, and deep time. These trees depend on inundation to live, yet now exist within a highly regulated system. The river is currently quite low and opposite to what the natural flows would be, high in winter and lower in summer. This is because irrigators prefer to buy water in summer and so water is released from the dams in summer.
My days were spent beneath the Yarra, alongside the river, where I carried the paper into the shallows, allowing sediment and movement to leave their trace. I then worked back into those surfaces over the following days. The drawings begin in the river itself, holding something of its material presence, its shifts, its memory and a type of collaboration with the river.
There were also moments of lightness. A magpie mother and her bub visited daily, curious and close. They would fly up to the table with the mother observing, almost with a critical eye, the colour palette, while the young one trilled out to the sky. Then, without hesitation, they would land. The mother magpie stepped quickly across the paper, as if feeling its surface beneath her claws. They were unexpected and welcome company.
Alongside this fieldwork, I spent time with the team at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and with my artist group, Hopeful Disruptions. Early conversations are beginning to shape the exhibition to come, opening 7 August at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery: Still | Life: shell | bone | breath.
From there, I moved further into the floodplain, arriving at Bibbaringa, a regenerative farming property connected with Earth Canvas. Our group ‘Hopeful Disruptions’ were successful in the 2024 round.
The shift in the landscape was immediate, yet connected.
The night sky opened wide, and mornings began with birdsong. The country felt held, quiet, sustained, and carefully tended.
The fields were alive with variation: reddish tones of native grasses—red grass and windmill grass—spikey sedges, greens of introduced species woven through, and the bright yellow of dandelions.
Cattle were brought through for a brief graze, it was just a day or two and they were trimming the grasses and softening the soil before moving on again. A light intervention, working with the cycles of the land rather than against them.
It was a different rhythm to the river’s edge, yet part of the same system.
Here, the work began to widen.
I found myself observing how river, floodplain, and farming practices intersect through care—how water, soil, and time are negotiated across these spaces. These experiences are beginning to translate into new drawings and moving image works, each holding traces of the places they emerge from.
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These Field Notes form part of my ongoing project, Tracing the Living Floodplain—a place-based exploration of how these living systems breathe, shift, and persist within altered environments, holding a fragile, precious, yet resilient living breath across the floodplain.
I’ve now moved further into the floodplain again, continuing this journey with another regenerative farming property.
I’ll share more from there soon.
If you’d like to follow more closely, you can read and subscribe here:
https://rochellesummerfield.com/field-notes
Warmly,
Rochelle
