Behind the Collection: Shaped by Water

The Kimberley’s: Shaped by Water

Have you ever seen and felt the land before time? The Kimberley’s is that place. It’s like nowhere else on Earth.

As far as your eye can see, there is only what nature intended. Everything you hear, are sounds created by the natural world. Everything you touch holds its place in the ecosystem, equally playing a role in the life of another living plant or creature. It’s a dance of the elements working in harmony that gives you a feeling of awe. A reminder to step lightly and leave no trace that you were ever there - so that it can forever be the land before time.

This new body of work Shaped by Water, is part two of my artistic impression of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Split into three parts, each honours a different natural element of this powerful region. The first was Earth & Fire, and the final release will explore Wind.

This collection belongs to water. It dives deeply into the vital role that water plays in the Kimberley landscape and acknowledges that water is the source of all life on earth.

“Water has sculpted and carved the earth; it supports wildlife, wildflowers, and interrupts wildfires.”

Water cannot be bound. I’m inspired by the way it feels to be in the presence of water in all it’s shapes and forms. Whether falling as rain, cascading through a gorge, flowing through a creek, descending from the height of a waterfall, or lapping against tidal flats. Always shaping, always moving, and never constrained.

I’ve always believed that art begins with experience. I experienced the Kimberley’s for the first time in August 2023 with my family. We hired a caravan and packed in the seven-month-old baby to get back to the red dirt road and experience the places we love so much. Remote Australia, where the reception runs out and there’s nothing but open plains in sight. It’s where I reconnect with nature, with my family, with myself. There’s space to breathe and remember what’s truly important.

I paint from memories of my experiences and let that incubate for a period of time until my intuition is ready to take over and create. Curiosity gets me every time and I want to explore the history, the native species that grow there and how the ecosystem works. I want to know when the native flowers are in bloom. I take a camera and a sketchbook and nothing else. I don’t like the idea of taking my artistic tools to places I am experiencing. I think it’s a distraction from being able to be fully present and absorb the environment to its fullest. When I’ve returned and it’s been some time, the collection will start to flow (pardon the pun). I pull out my field guides, my photos and sketches at times; But mostly, I try to remember how it felt to be there.

“Somewhere between the unreliability of memory and the weight of emotion, a painting begins.”

I try not to have an expectation of how the finished painting will look. I let my intuition take over and encourage a sense of play. This is part I love most about painting - I never know what the artwork will look like when it’s finished and the only way to know is to complete the work. After some time, the paintings become like little puzzles that need solving and you can’t rush the solution. Some are created quickly and others like to take shape over time. 

Working intuitively means that this collection of artworks all have a different look and feel to one another. Water is present in so many ways in the Kimberley’s… always fluid, always calming, always strong - but different. Standing in the rain will feel different to being in a waterfall. Even in the same boat, floating down a gorge feels different to being in a tidal creek of the ocean.

While the general ‘art rule’ is that collections are a concept of tight visual cohesion, this feels disregarded in my body of work. It is drawn together by all the ways that water takes shape across the Kimberley and all the different ways water makes you feel. The collection isn’t bound by rules, it’s free flowing and shaped by water.

I hope you enjoy experiencing the collection & that you saw something that made tyou smile today & had the capacity to pass it on.

With Love, Steph