Meandering: in search of tomorrow

Meander: 1. A curve of a river or stream; 2. An indirect or aimless journey. As I trace the edges of the river, memories of my life flow. Spanning 8 years, photographs of the lower Hawkesbury River traverse through feelings of nostalgia, anxiety and hope.

Meander [miˈæn.dər]
noun
1.    a curve of a river or stream
2.   an indirect or aimless journey

As I trace the edges of the river, memories of my life flow. Immersed in a seemingly timeless landscape on the edge of Sydney, Australia, I am pre-occupied with the future – what will it look like when my children, currently on the verge of adulthood, are my age? These thoughts traverse through feelings of nostalgia, anxiety and hope – for the natural world and for the generations to come.

Ranging from watercolour paper, through primed paper, to photographic paper, the final medium changes how we perceive the landscape.

The images in the black and white prints on hand-made light-weight paper are, like our memories, softened at the edges – broken down slowly through hand-guided erasure.

The photographs depicting portraits of riverside ecology are printed on a man-made substrate of acrylic paint – an ecology of underlying degradation.

The photographs printed on photographic paper rejoice in the beauty of the land and life, and in a future of natural abundance – symbolised through children and the currently endangered Glossy black cockatoos, widely seen by First Nations’ people as protectors and spiritual guardians. The landscape breathes and beckons in its slow beauty, doing what it has always done.

In this version of tomorrow, there is hope.

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Like most photographers, I find my camera provides me with a unique portal through which to view the world. From the vantage point of my 40-year-old tinnie, I can explore and view the river landscape from the water's edge. I am drawn to the relationships between the elements of earth, air and water; rocks and trees; flora and fauna, but most importantly, it is the atmosphere that interests me the most - the elusive shift of light that changes a scene from one moment to the next.

It is through communing with nature, as with kin, that we will find the imperative to protect it.