SW_003 At the Water’s Edge (8 November 2025)
The final softwash drew audiences into the wet, liminal spaces of the Tweed River. Guided by queer ecological thinking, At the Water’s Edge encouraged participants to attune to multispecies relations and reflect on interdependence. Artists explored themes of sovereignty, non-dualism, language and care through performances, workshops and installations that invited visitors to listen differently and soften their edges.
Featured artists: Erica Eurell, Norton Fredericks, Tay Haggarty, Ruby Donohue, Anna Whitaker, Kinly Grey, Kim Stokes and Hannah Bronte.
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softwash was an artist-led program of experimental, site-responsive live art presented on Bundjalung Country | Tweed Heads. Across three free events, softwash reimagined the public parklands at the Tweed Regional Museum Learning Site as a place for artists and community to gather, share and make meaning together.
This program was assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, made possible with auspicing from The FARM, development support from City of Gold Coast, and venue support from Tweed Regional Museum and Arts Northern Rivers.
SW003 photography by Georgia Haupt.
View the softwash archive on Substack and Instagram.
softwash design by Marilena Hewitt
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Norton Fredericks
Workshop: Hope Catcher
Participants learned how to create natural fibre twine using just their hands and sat with Norton discussing future hopes for ourselves, the community and our environment. Hope Catcher is an ephemeral fibre art installation that participants were invited to contribute their twine and wishes to.
Norton Fredericks is an early career interdisciplinary visual artist and workshop facilitator. Norton has mixed European and Aboriginal Australian (Murri) heritage currently living on Kombumerri Country, Gold Coast. Norton’s practice-based research often sits at the intersection between art and science examining the external forces that impact on both the human experience and the environment around us. Their work explores themes of environmental threats, post naturalism, queer ecologies, and their intersectional identity. Norton imbues their work with geographical memories and examines how environmental variables respond with materials.
Norton Fredericks
Sky Commission: Contamination Map: Site 1
Cobaki Nature Reserve along with Cobaki Creek and Terranora Creek are heavily contaminated by PFAS chemical run off due to the proximity to the Gold Coast Airport. A local Indigenous woman who frequently ate seafood from these waterways had blood tests that showed her PFAS levels were in the top 5 per cent of results for her age. PFAS chemicals have been used in Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) the Class B firefighting foam used to fight aviation and other chemical fires as well as within aircraft hydraulic fluid and aircraft deicing and anti-icing fluids. ‘Contamination Map: Site 1’ has been created with the help of the local Gold Coast community, helping print the quilted cotton using local Wallum plants while the cyanotype has been developed using contaminated water samples from the Cobaki Creek adjacent to the airport.
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kinly grey The Rat Disappears
“Once I was accused, point blank and unprovoked, of being terrible at rhyming. If that is true, my sincerest apologies to my readers. I wrote this poem in a fevered state in which I could not stop hallucinating my thoughts in a rhyming meter. But it goes some way to express my last couple of years of research into the philosophical nature of being, cosmology, pedagogy, physics, slam poetry, mathematics, harmonic and morphic resonance, extrasensory perception, science fiction, various theologies, art, careful observation of the world, and so on. Importantly, my mixing pot is the practice of persisting in daily life, my studio is my thoughts, and my lens is a steadfast belief in the oneness of it all.”
“I was born and raised on Gidhabal Country. I've been thinking about the nature of things since I can remember thinking, and sometimes I have the opportunity to express my thoughts through artworks. Historically a visual artist, and install technician in art galleries and museums, I'm now studying to be a primary school teacher after becoming disillusioned with the state of being an artist in bureaucratic art systems. Enjoying this new direction, it is my absolute pleasure to be involved in this project and have the opportunity to express myself through writing in such a welcoming context.”
READ THE RAT DISAPPEARS
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And our River Goddess, Hannah Bronte serving oyster and cunt in the tidal zone.
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Erica Eurell Welcome to Country
Erica Eurell is a Traditional Custodian from the families of the Yugambeh, Tweed River people and Wollumbin. She was born and continues to live on the Gold Coast. She has a strong connection to Community and in particular young people, as she has two daughters herself. Erica has a strong desire to ensure our Aboriginal Youth have a space to tell their stories and learn the importance of telling them and connecting them with opportunities and culture. Erica runs her own company, Dreamtime Artistry that helps support our next generation of First Nations Artists.
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Tay Haggarty PISS TAKE
Splashing, overflowing and lapping at the edge. PISS TAKE was a series of small ephemeral water fountains that play in the murky waters between sculpture and performance. As the water is pumped through, looping and pooling, the fountain failures investigate the overlapping’s of queer time, watersports and the archiving of memory.
Tay Haggarty is a Magandjin (Brisbane) based multidisciplinary artist making at the intersections of performance, video and sculpture. Their practice is interested in queer abstraction and explores how reductive forms can be used as an open field to reflect upon personal and shared queer experience. The materials or props used are frequently industrial or ready-made and their work is often collaborative, minimal and site specific.
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Anna Whitaker Tidal//Tonal
Tidal//Tonal was a live sound performance composed in collaboration with the Tweed River. Using submerged hydrophones, the work listened to the river’s murmurings, collisions, and quiet disturbances - an improvised duet between artist and water.
Following the performance, a vocal somatic workshop invited participants to explore voice, breath, and body in resonance with the river’s shifting rhythms. Through sound and movement, each body became an instrument of listening and release.
The work invited a soft dissolution of boundaries between human and more-than-human, performer and environment. The river was not backdrop but co-performer, shaping the score in real time. Together, the performance and workshop opened space for a slow, fluid encounter—one that attuned to the porous and interwoven nature of being.
Anna Whitaker is a multi award-winning sound designer and composer based in Magan-djin/Brisbane, known for her bold sonic imagination and nuanced compositional foundation. A graduate of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music with a Bachelor of Music Technology, Anna’s work lives at the intersection of traditional musical structures and experimental sound art. Her practice fuses her classical training with contemporary electronic techniques to create immersive, visceral soundscapes—often working in surround sound and multichannel formats.
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Kim Stokes Soft Soft Reading Club
“When re-imagining "reading club" for At The Waters Edge I wanted to play around with words. It seems that words are inherently dualistic – definitive, holding inside so much of themselves.”
By breaking down books to words, words to letters, we move from endless clarification towards slippery paradox and unknowing. To help us explore the gooey edges of language, Kim created a simple asemic poem activity, for all to fill out throughout the afternoon.
Kim Stokes is an emerging artist and curator based in the Yugambeh Language Region / Gold Coast, who investigates the complexities of digital culture. Using text, lens-based media and archival methods, she explores the ways in which people and technology intersect, and how spirituality and unknowing might generate new ways of thinking about these connections. She is passionate about amplifying independent, artist-led stories through research and collaboration; working on projects such as Nextdoor ARI, The Goldy and SEA-CRAFT.
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Ruby Donohoe VANISHING POINTS
Map making is a form of prayer-making too.
It says, what was once here can be found again.
What was once here, still exists
And chances are, you can find it again.
And yet…
In the face of a system of errors, a system of eros floods forward.
Ruby Donohoe is an interdisciplinary artist working with choreography as a mode of critical inquiry into the body’s political, sensory, and relational capacities. Her practice spans live performance, participatory frameworks, video, and installation to examine how bodies negotiate visibility, coherence, and control. Informed by her experience of epilepsy, her work foregrounds instability as a generative methodology—where interruption, hesitation, and disorientation become tools for rethinking embodiment. Attentive to expanded thresholds between animate and inanimate, public and private, Ruby’s works propose estrangement as an ethics of attention and a strategy for queering perception, relation, and form.
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Erica Eurell is a Traditional Custodian from the families of the Yugambeh, Tweed River people and Wollumbin. She was born and continues to live on the Gold Coast. She has a strong connection to Community and in particular young people, as she has two daughters herself. Erica has a strong desire to ensure our Aboriginal Youth have a space to tell their stories and learn the importance of telling them and connecting them with opportunities and culture. Erica runs her own company, Dreamtime Artistry that helps support our next generation of First Nations Artists.
︎
Tay Haggarty PISS TAKE
Splashing, overflowing and lapping at the edge. PISS TAKE was a series of small ephemeral water fountains that play in the murky waters between sculpture and performance. As the water is pumped through, looping and pooling, the fountain failures investigate the overlapping’s of queer time, watersports and the archiving of memory.
Tay Haggarty is a Magandjin (Brisbane) based multidisciplinary artist making at the intersections of performance, video and sculpture. Their practice is interested in queer abstraction and explores how reductive forms can be used as an open field to reflect upon personal and shared queer experience. The materials or props used are frequently industrial or ready-made and their work is often collaborative, minimal and site specific.
︎
Anna Whitaker Tidal//Tonal
Tidal//Tonal was a live sound performance composed in collaboration with the Tweed River. Using submerged hydrophones, the work listened to the river’s murmurings, collisions, and quiet disturbances - an improvised duet between artist and water.
Following the performance, a vocal somatic workshop invited participants to explore voice, breath, and body in resonance with the river’s shifting rhythms. Through sound and movement, each body became an instrument of listening and release.
The work invited a soft dissolution of boundaries between human and more-than-human, performer and environment. The river was not backdrop but co-performer, shaping the score in real time. Together, the performance and workshop opened space for a slow, fluid encounter—one that attuned to the porous and interwoven nature of being.
Anna Whitaker is a multi award-winning sound designer and composer based in Magan-djin/Brisbane, known for her bold sonic imagination and nuanced compositional foundation. A graduate of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music with a Bachelor of Music Technology, Anna’s work lives at the intersection of traditional musical structures and experimental sound art. Her practice fuses her classical training with contemporary electronic techniques to create immersive, visceral soundscapes—often working in surround sound and multichannel formats.
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Kim Stokes Soft Soft Reading Club
“When re-imagining "reading club" for At The Waters Edge I wanted to play around with words. It seems that words are inherently dualistic – definitive, holding inside so much of themselves.”
By breaking down books to words, words to letters, we move from endless clarification towards slippery paradox and unknowing. To help us explore the gooey edges of language, Kim created a simple asemic poem activity, for all to fill out throughout the afternoon.
Kim Stokes is an emerging artist and curator based in the Yugambeh Language Region / Gold Coast, who investigates the complexities of digital culture. Using text, lens-based media and archival methods, she explores the ways in which people and technology intersect, and how spirituality and unknowing might generate new ways of thinking about these connections. She is passionate about amplifying independent, artist-led stories through research and collaboration; working on projects such as Nextdoor ARI, The Goldy and SEA-CRAFT.
︎
Ruby Donohoe VANISHING POINTS
Map making is a form of prayer-making too.
It says, what was once here can be found again.
What was once here, still exists
And chances are, you can find it again.
And yet…
In the face of a system of errors, a system of eros floods forward.
Ruby Donohoe is an interdisciplinary artist working with choreography as a mode of critical inquiry into the body’s political, sensory, and relational capacities. Her practice spans live performance, participatory frameworks, video, and installation to examine how bodies negotiate visibility, coherence, and control. Informed by her experience of epilepsy, her work foregrounds instability as a generative methodology—where interruption, hesitation, and disorientation become tools for rethinking embodiment. Attentive to expanded thresholds between animate and inanimate, public and private, Ruby’s works propose estrangement as an ethics of attention and a strategy for queering perception, relation, and form.
