LIVING WATER: companion flood books 2022 - 2023
Flood damaged photocopy paper reems, wind, rain, sun, leaves, insects, time.
2024 LIVING WATER: the ocean stretched and LIVING WATER: library.
QCAD White Box Gallery and Grey St Gallery, Meanjin Brisbane, QLD
2023 of a thing that could not be put back
Art at the Bank, Cecil Place Precinct, Union Bank, 236-238 Chapel St Prahran, Naarm Melbourne, Vic
Companion Thinking Symposium
CARI, Griffith University, Meanjin Brisbane, QLD
2022 abbe
QCAD, Griffith University, Meanjin Brisbane, Qld
companion flood books' evolution 2022-2023
Bundjalung, Arakwal, Widjabul Wyabul, and Nyangbul Country
My companion thinkers include Widjabul Wyabul, Nyangbul, Arakwal and Bundjalung Country, The High Arctic, Cyclone Debbie, flood, ice, rain, glaciers, wind, mark-making, found object, gravity, humidity, storytelling, listening, light, texture, touch, smell, birds, moss, lichen, ink, elementals, community, time, insects, flood mud, TAFE, paper, weather; sun, leaves and trees, Entities, the invisible along with the visible, projection, ice, river and the whole catchment down to the flood plains of Lismore, and water in all its forms.
companion flood books - evolution
Flood and elementally affected photocopy paper discarded by Lismore Tafe following the 2022 floods.
Whilst cleaning up after the 2022 extreme flooding in Lismore, I came across a muddy, sodden pile of dumped photocopy paper. I followed my instinct to gather them up and bring them home. They were dumped once again, this time onto a table outside my studio, where they remained for the next year.
When I had that first realisation that these piles of soggy paper were emerging books that were being created and written by the elements, I recognised my role was to support this action. I started to look at these books differently, sensing they held the felt story of this last year of flood and rebuild (2022-2023), expressing both trauma and quietness, a slowing down, a mingling, and a connectivity with the planetary weather systems. By relinquishing active control and not trying to shelter the paper from the elements, I was curious to see what might be revealed when we worked together—what might happen when we thought together. Was this when we became true companions?
The story continued in the potential of these books to bring my research full circle from the floods and residency in the High Arctic six years earlier to the current floods—direct experiences of the impact of extreme weather and the melting polar glaciers. This interconnected story, told through the natural cycles of water, is at the heart of my research. These books were slowly revealed through intertwined processes of chance, sympoiesis, companion thinking, sensorial awareness, adaptation, weather, and respect for environment. It occurred to me that the next, natural step in their evolution or composition was to put the books back into water and to freeze them, to complete the hydro-cycle and to materially connect them back to the source of my DVA., the High Arctic
image: Robyn Wood
image: Robyn Wood
image: Robyn Wood
image: Robyn Wood
LIVING WATER: the ocean stretched 2024
The White Box Gallery
QCAD, Meanjin Brisbane, Queensland
My companion thinkers in this work included ocean, rain, rivers, humidity, ice, and flood, Family, friends, colleagues, technicians, strangers, air, wind, mud, mould, gravity, paper, plants, animals, light, sound, community, books, Auslan, the deaf community, projection,
Bundjalung, Arakwal, Widjabul Wyabul, Nyangbul, Jaggera, and Turrbal Country.
And many more, invisible and unknown.
LIVING WATER: the ocean stretched 2024
This installation is the culmination of my Doctor of Visual Art (Research) into our relationship with Living Water. A celebration of the slow study of listening, transformation, kinship, and co-creation, the final work was conceived in ice and flood, and finishes in flood and ice, emerging as a meditation on the profound effects of climate change on our planetary water-cycles.
My aim has been to co-create an environment where time, water, and memory intertwine in an invitation to engage with a library of companion flood books. These books were born out of photocopy paper rescued after the 2022 Northern Rivers floods on Bundjalung Country, and then co-authored over a year of companion thinking in a reflect-and-response dance between the elements, the paper, and myself as they sat outside my studio. By freezing the books in ice, I placed them into a cycle of freeze and melt as a metaphor for the planetary link of glacial melt and extreme weather that is central to their story. Through a daily ritual of sympoiesis -- making together -- I join the water as we cycle together in an ongoing conversation.
The installation includes a projection of a woman signing in Auslan, silently communicating Greta Thunberg’s 2018 urgent call for action. The figure's passionate movements seem to shout as she strives to convey the urgency of her message, calling on us to listen, to understand, and to care. Her presence is deliberate and purposeful, urging us to reflect on our relationship with the environment and the pressing need for a more respectful and sustainable way forward.
Visitors are welcome to join us in a daily water ritual
LIVING WATER: library 2024
The Grey Street Gallery
QCAD, Meanjin Brisbane, Queensland
My companion thinkers included Arakwal and Bundjalung Custodians, The High Arctic, Cyclone Debbie, multiple floods, rain, glaciers, wind, mark-making, found object, gravity, humidity, storytelling, listening, light, texture, touch, smell, birds, moss, lichen, ink, elementals, community, time, insects, flood mud, TAFE, paper, weather; sun, leaves and trees, Entities, the invisible along with the visible, river and the whole catchment down to the flood plains of Lismore, ice, projection, and time.
LIVING WATER: library - companion flood books 2024
Flood and elementally affected photocopy paper in ice, arctic integration projection, photograph.
The companion flood books were also exhibited in the Grey St Gallery, along with an anthology of nine other books that had emerged from different experiences and projects through the course of my doctoral research.
Each day a newly frozen book was brought down from the freezer in the LIVING WATER: the ocean stretched installation, which held the full library of companion flood books. The block of ice and paper was placed on a darkened plinth in the Grey Street Gallery, replacing the now melted book from the previous day. That book was taken to join its companions in the library upstairs.
Slowly, during the course of the next 24 hours, the ice melted, running down the glass plinth to gently drip into a glass vitrine underneath. The meltwater was collected each day to reuse in freezing the next book, thus maintaining a closed cycle of water from melt to freeze to melt. Projected onto the book was an image of a melting glacier in the High Arctic, taken during my 2017 residency in Svalbard. As the block of ice slowly melted, the image gently swayed over the icy water and textures of the book as they were revealed, bringing an added sense of floating and movement into the process.
As with many of the elements in this final exhibition of the research, the image had first been used at the beginning of the doctorate in an installation closely linked to the the changes I personally experienced in the Arctic circle in this time of climate crisis. This circular relationship between the physical artefacts emerging out of the research became central to the final installations as a direct metaphor of the interconnected nature of our relationship with water and its essential cycles.