OPENING 5:00 – 7:00PM FRIDAY 12 JUNE 2026
Welcome to Country by Danza Deacon
Performance by the Doobai Dancers
Balun Gawarima – River Story is an exhibition by local artist Melody Popple, developed as part of her PhD Moving Through Waters, exploring the cultural significance of water on Bundjalung Country through bush dyeing, natural pigment processes, and visual story-mapping.
Created across major waterways of Bundjalung Jagun, each work emerges through a process of co-creation with Country. Native flora, found materials, and water gathered from specific river systems are used to produce bush dyes (eco-printed) textiles that hold the physical imprint of place. Water acts as both subject and collaborator – activating pigments, transferring memory, and shaping the final visual outcome. Through this process, the artworks become visual story-maps that embody relationships between land, water, memory, healing, disruption, and renewal.
The work responds to the lived realities of a post-flood Bundjalung landscape, where communities hold both fear and reverence for water. It reflects on water as a transformative force that ruptures and repairs, destroys and replenishes, carrying both trauma and healing. Through repeated acts of returning to waterways, sitting with place, collecting, listening, and creating, the practice becomes an act of relationality and reciprocity – an offering back to Country.
Displayed as a combination of wall and ceiling hangings, Balun Gawarima – River Story creates an immersive and embodied encounter with water stories, allowing Indigenous knowledge to be experienced beyond the written page. These artefacts challenge western academic expectations by asserting visual art, process, and material practice as rigorous forms of knowledge production. As part of the broader PhD, this body of work contributes to an Indigenous-led methodology that centres Country as co-creator and positions artmaking as a vessel for cultural continuity, truth-telling, and healing on Bundjalung Country.
BIO
Melody Popple is a Bundjalung woman, researcher, and visual artist working across Indigenous methodologies, storytelling, and place-based art practice. Her work explores cultural identity, relationality with Country, and the healing potential of water through bush dyeing, natural pigment processes, and visual story-mapping. Through her PhD research, Moving through Waters, she investigates the cultural significance of water on Bundjalung Country, creating artworks that position Country as co-creator and artmaking as a vessel for Indigenous knowledge, truth-telling, and connection. @oncountry.arts