Annique Goldenberg

​This body of work is the culmination of my Doctor of Visual Art research, where I have been exploring the nature of our relationship with Living Water in a time of climate crisis. A deliberate and slow study of listening, transformation, kinship, care, and co-creation, the research was conceived in ice and flood, and has come full circle to conclude in flood and ice.

 

I have found that the outcomes emerged as a meditation on a profound, creative entanglement with Earth’s water-cycles, and our place as companions in that cycle.

 

The research has been shaped by personal experience and by stories shared by others, both human and nonhuman, who I have come to understand and recognise as my co-creative companions. Time spent on a residency in the High Arctic witnessing accelerated glacial melt, along with the impact of three extreme floods in my own community, have deepened my understanding and sense of response-ability for our interconnectedness with Earth’s hydrological systems. These experiences, along with a lifetime spent living on or near water, have reinforced my awareness of the fragility, resilience, and power of this essential element to which we are so intimately connected.

​

The White Box Gallery harbours an environment where time, water, and memory intertwine. Visitors are invited to explore a collection of flood companion books, born out of photocopy paper rescued from the gutter after the Northern Rivers 2022 floods on Bundjalung Country. Co-authored over a year of companion thinking in a reflect-and-response dance between myself, the elements, and the paper, the resultant flood books are now frozen in ice for this installation, as a metaphor for the planetary link of glacial melt and extreme weather that is central to their story. A daily ritual with the ice books welcomes visitors to join as companion thinkers, moving the flood books together through their cycle of freeze, melt, and re-freeze.

​

In the Grey Street Gallery, an anthology of ten artist books invites visitors to engage with their watery presence using touch, smell, sight, sound, and curiosity. These artist books were not pre-planned or imagined, rather they emerged out of the different creative projects throughout the research, each book embodying insights and an essence of their respective stories and experiences through their form and materiality.