Still Glides The Stream
and
Shall Forever Glide?
Still Glides the Stream and Shall Forever Glide? 2017, Etching inks, chinagraph pencil and oil pastels on five free standing Perspex panels and native hardwood supports, each 48 x 100 cm.
A reproduction of this iconic Australian work hung in Anne’s childhood home in Heidelberg. In counter to Streeton’s romanticised pastoral view of cleared land abutting the water’s edge, Anne’s translucent multi panelled painting presents the messy revegetated banks of the Yarra River as it is today. Designed to walk around in order to understand the twisting bends and the shifting shadows, Anne’s painted installation places emphasis on the Yarra as an ecosystem system in flux, and under continued pressure from urbanisation and global climate change. Anne questions the certainty that the Yarra, and other river systems throughout Australia, will indeed eternally flow, despite the apparent reassurance proffered by its regenerated bushy fringe.
This five panel work references the site along the Yarra River (Birrarung), near Heidelberg, where Sir Arthur Streeton painted in the 1890s, and the title of one of his most famous works. Borrowing a line from the English poet, William Wordworth’s The River Duddon cycle, ‘Still glide the stream and shall forever glide’, Streeton presented the Yarra River as a metaphor for the transience of each individual human’s existence in contrast to the “enduring beauty of art” and presumed everlasting flow of the river. [www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/859/]
This work has been exhibited in States of Being: the elemental importance of water, Hatch Contemporary Arts Space, Ivanhoe 2017, and as part of the Yarra Yarra Project, Testing Grounds,Melbounre, 2018 in collaboration with sound artist Alice Bennett, accompanied by percussionist Nat Grant.
Still Glides the Stream and Shall Forever Glide? also is reproduced in Buckrich, Judith. Yarra Birrarung: Artists, Writers and the River, Melbourne, Melbourne Books, 2024, p.223.ISBN: 978-1-9227793-2-8
Photos: Cristo Crocker