Zoe Tweedale

Tideland

on view in the gallery
30 November – 21 December 2024

In Newcastle where the Hunter River meets the ocean, coal terminals and bulk carrier ships dominate the entire northern half of the harbour. An industrial landscape that feeds the world’s insatiable demand for coal. But in this same channel you will see cormorants and darters fishing alongside the towering ships, and then later drying their wings the next lamp-post over from the osprey’s perch at the Cowrie Hole. Pelicans and gulls cluster on the sand, herons stalk the rockpools, and to the north within view of the hulking coal loaders; migratory shorebirds return in summer from their breeding season in the arctic tundra. Precious habitats cling on, precarious but full of avian life.

Tideland is about these tenacious birds of the rock pools, shorelines, estuaries and salt marshes; the transitional environments between the land and the ocean. All can be found within the surrounds of Newcastle where they hunt for fish or pick the tidal sands for worms. Some familiar and others furtive, together they are fascinating in their shared diversity, which in turn is but a small slice of the whole. Collectively they trace a shadow of a place: a landscape either absent or shown as strange and fragmentary: somewhere at once maritime and alien.

Though this perspective of the fractured landscape’s avian inhabitants, Tideland meditates on ecology and place in world that is in flux.