Goldfields: Hillside and Riverland

What is landscape?

It is never just scenery. It is memory, disturbance, resilience, an ongoing story written into earth, water, and the marks left by human interventions. I live in a region shaped by natural beauty and ongoing rupture. Bushland surrounds Ballarat, a city built on the extractive frenzy of the gold rush. Not far from my home rises Black Hill: once sliced and carved, mined, and scarred, yet still holding its own presence under the sky. I walk there often. Its altered form carries the weight of nineteenth‑century ambition, a reminder of the global history of extraction that treated land as resource rather than living entity.

Below the hill runs the Yarrowee River. Like many local waterways, it was reshaped, polluted, and burdened by the building of the city. Its recovery is ongoing. In these works, I trace the river’s present character, its remnants, its regrowth, its persistence. The riverlands are a record of survival: silting, clogging, clearing, healing, flowing again.

Some pieces echo the language of traditional landscape painting; others let materials behave like the processes they evoke. Pigments split and settle like silt. Water runs, marks tangle like undergrowth. These works sit between recognition and abstraction, recording what is seen and what is sensed.

Created on Arches 300gsm watercolour paper, using charcoal, rock and earth pigments, watercolour, and gouache, the series approaches landscape as a material, living presence, an intricate site of elemental activity, history, and ongoing change.

Works are priced unframed, with framing available on request.