The Long Remembering
Earlier this year, I took a large-scale River Red Gum drawing with me as I travelled through the Riverina.
Rolled carefully for the road, The Long Remembering came with me as I returned to the Marrambidya (Murrumbidgee River) and its floodplains. Along the way I painted sections of the tree on the properties of farmers I visited. I unrolled it in the field under the gaze of curious cows, in sheds and beside the riverbank — learning and speaking with farmers about the river, old trees, changing water flows, and their care for the landscapes and animals within this vast floodplain.
The painting travelled home with me to my studio, carrying something of those encounters into its final making.
Within the trunk of the old River Red Gum is Dhundhu, the Black Swan, is held within blues and purples of the night sky. The tree became a way for me to think about memory across very different measures of time — the long life of a River Red Gum, the diurnal passage from day into night held within the trees colours, and the histories held within a landscape.
Now The Long Remembering stands at the end of the first passage into STILL | LIFE.
STILL | LIFE — re-calling the Marrambidya through sound, touch and vision.
STILL | LIFE is an exhibition by Hopeful Disruptions — Will Rodgers (soundscapes), Tracy Pateman (small metal, carved wood) and Rochelle Summerfield (painting, moving image) at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. Show runs till 18th October.
The Marrambidya is a highly controlled river within one of the largest and most regulated watersheds in the world. Through sound, carved wood and metal, painting, drawing and moving image, the exhibition brings the crushing of swan eggs and destruction of bird nurseries at Parkan Pregan Lagoon during colonisation into relationship with the damming and unmaking of the Marrambidya and her tributaries.
At the end of this first passage stands The Long Remembering — an old River Red Gum is a living witness holding these memories across deep time.
Moving beyond the corridor, the river opens into the floodplain.
Tracing the Living Floodplain
My ephemeral wall painting What Remains was painted directly onto the gallery walls during the installation. Fragments of the river and its floodplain hold the shaped paintings of stones, the animation of grasses and a River Red Gum. At the close of the exhibition, the wall painting will be washed away.
Its disappearance echoes something of the river’s own fragility and the responsibility we hold in its care. The river is not simply water moving through a landscape to be extracted. It is a life force, sustaining an abundance of interconnected life.
The stone forms of The Slow Becoming and the moving grasses of Living Resonance embrace very different experiences of time — surfaces echoing the quiet work of water, weathering and lichens, alongside the embodied dance of grasses that emerge, move, seed and disappear within a season.
Throughout this project I have kept returning to a question:
How does a living river breathe within a landscape increasingly altered by human need?
There is loss and alteration here, yet during my journey I also found hope. Hope was a message shared by Wiradjuri Elder Aunty Cheryl Penrith OAM through her stories and her belief in working together. Across the Marrambidya I also encountered care, resilience and continuance — in the river, its plants and animals, and in the farmers working to care for these living systems.
A fragile, precious and resilient living breath still persists.
