This work was created for KSCA’s ten year survey exhibition at Manly Art Gallery & Museum and touring to Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.
installation of foraged and hand woven plants - juncus, flax, cumbungi, rice paper, wax, pigment, drawing and cyanotype on mixed media, brass, water, light and participation
Weaving Water comes in many iterations.
Morphing from a giant ephemeral land sculpture in 2020, to delicate string creations at Cementa22, from hundreds of hands adding one piece, to one pair working for days, each version is a collaboration with our plant kin, a respectful harvest of material, creative experiments with growing and making to understand connectivity and a process of shared experiential learning. An ethic of care is intrinsic to gathering from living systems and co-creating with community. Each gift is valued, reused and eventually passed back to land.
The liminal zone of the wetland intrigues Leanne. Like skin, it acts as permeable membranes between habitats, and also a temporal container for water. Water glimpsed but often just below the surface: filling, holding, releasing, a rhythm that buffers seasonal variation. Dense rhizomic root systems, intricate vascular networks, chains of ponds, treacherous impenetrable terrain; in unison these create a resilient and nurturing landscape thrumming with life and continuously slowing, filtering, accreting to produce clean water and stable soil.
This work is an offering into the collaborative potential of multi-species conversation. Many of the Weaving Water dialogues have existed as on-site explorations across fence lines, into places where water resides in the landscape and where creative practice can engage local communities in this discussion. This iteration was different. An in-studio intimate chat, just me, the plants juncus, phragmites, cumbungi and flax and my questions and observations.. How can wetlands be reinvigorated in a depleted floodplain? How do I understand water as it is held within other living structures and out of sight: in soil, precarious re-establishing plant communities, the shimmering impermanence of chain-of -ponds in ‘a state of becoming’ ? How do these thoughts even move through my work into a gallery environment?
Making this amount of string from foraged plants requires a certain intensity, but the conversation I am drawn into sidelines time. Flexibility and constraint are paramount instead. Tenacity and respect are required not only in the process, but intrinsic qualities of collaborating in work with both these species as materials and arising through building relationship with their ecological wellbeing at source, supporting regeneration.
Cyanotype reveals another story held by these same plants, a different material reality where their shadow resists light, and a whole colour palette is revealed by toning using their botanical signatures.
Welling and Seepage.
How do I see myself as a body made mostly of water?
A conglomeration of cells and molecules of H2O?
Like a river, we confuse the place with the water,
But that water has already left.
Or the ocean, deep with strange ancestral organisms and tides dragged by the moon?
Above the dry floodplain is the tree with the canoe scar.
Breathe
Into your cells
All those little spaces crammed with water.
I am the swamp
Container of futures.
My body grows from the tangled roots of others.
There are birds in my hair, my belly hides frog spawn and black snake.