Kirsten Wehner, Seep (detail), 2024. Image courtesy the artist.
Kirsten Wehner
Gallery 2
Friday 24 January - Sunday 16 February
Opening Thursday 23 January 2025, 6pm - 8pm
Weston Creek in south-western suburban Canberra was once an intermittent stream, a system of rills, soaks and wetlands vibrantly alive with plants, insects and birds. Today, the waterway is largely piped and drained, forced underground or encased in concrete, struggling with pollution from street run-off and largely invisible to people who live in the area. And, yet, the creek is still there, flowing as it can, supporting life as it can, creating traces that ask us to know it.
Creek explores life along Weston Creek, asking what it might mean to care better for this disordered place. Inspired by talks and walks with Ngunawal Elders Uncle Wally Bell and Aunty Karen Denny that considered the creek as Country, the exhibition explores some of the ways in which people connect with and seek to look after places along the waterway. What kind of action is needed to realise the waterway’s return as a place of cultural/ecological flourishing? How can we act respectfully to Ngunawal heritage and custodianship of this place? How do embodied multi-species processes of weeding and planting relate to the never-ending round of re-engineering deeply disrupted flows? How might the puzzle be put together to realise a practice of respect and nurture for the living creek?
In the exhibition, a simple framework of gathered sticks invites audiences to hold the idea of the creek, as it once was, in their imaginations. In the bends and eddies of this structure, watercolour and pastel works document people’s responses to the waterway and its possible futures. Works documenting the humbling commitment of volunteer groups to restoring native habitat within the catchment sit near to pieces capturing the invasive engineering that re-enacts legacies of managing flows through steel and concrete. Others speak more obliquely to practices of neglect. These works incorporate ideas of fracture, using multiple panels or separated surfaces to repel any assumption that we can reduce the waterway to a ‘view’. We are in it, not outside it, whether we like it or not.
About the Artist
Kirsten Wehner is the M16 Artspace/ConceptSix Environmental Artist-in-Residence for 2024/5. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and curator based in Ngunawal Country who works across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and participatory experience. Kirsten’s practice explores people’s relationships within the more-than-human world, seeking to generate cross-species connection, empathy and care. Recent work focuses on waterways, asking how these disordered and unloved places can be re-imagined as holders of story and sites of cultural/ecological potential.
Kirsten has held residencies at the University of Canberra/Belconnen Arts Centre, the University of Sydney and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. She has delivered experiences and exhibited in Australia and the UK. Significant recent projects include the National Museum of Australia pop-up touring installation River Country, the documentary More than a Fish Kill, and Finding Weston, Considering Country, a Traditional Custodian-led series of on Country walks facilitated through Catchment Studio.
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