Rebecca McEwan
Convergence
June 7 - July 27, 2025
Exhibition Launch Saturday, June 7 at 2 - 4 pm
In an ongoing project, Rebecca McEwan continues a journey of quiet discovery, blending the ethereal with the tangible. Her work revolves around the many waterways surrounding her that tell the tales of time—including the Ngangkipari/Onkaparinga River and the Dhungala/Murray River, bodies of water, ancient and sacred, that have etched their stories into the land.
Through listening, walking, and paddling along their banks and currents, Rebecca seeks to understand them not just as geographical features, but as living entities. With each stride and each stroke of the paddle, rivers offer their secrets; they sing in the rustle of the vegetation on the banks, they speak in the ripple of water, they murmur in the twilight. This intimate dialogue between the rivers and the artist is sensitively documented, forming a visual catalogue that captures the essence of their interaction.
In knowing these rivers on a deeper level, Rebecca has come to appreciate the simple truth—one can only truly care for what one fully understands. This ongoing body of work is an ode to the rivers, a testament to their beauty and significance, and a call to others to look deeper, listen closer, and tread gently. For in understanding, we find the roots of our care, and in care, we find the essence of our connection.
Image: ‘If wishes were fishes’ (detail) Paper thread 170 x 110 cm 2024
Bio
Rebecca McEwan is a cross-disciplinary artist who lives and works on Kaurna land on the Fleurieu Peninsula.
McEwan’s practice encompasses installation, sculpture, drawing and sound. She draws on natural materials, oral histories, and archival material to create work that honours connection to place.
McEwan’s intricate and delicate installations incorporate narrative, glass thread, wax, and botanical material. Grounded in observation, her work emerges from site-specific investigations that respond to local histories, the immediate environment, and natural phenomena.
Research is pivotal to McEwan’s practice. She frequently engages in community consultation to observe local knowledge or lore, exploring the way in which ancient knowledge can shape speculative histories, and give rise to pseudo-scientific enquiry.
Meditative, layered in its processes, McEwan’s work offers a reflection on the connection between humans and nature and invites a state of reverence.
The artist exhibits regularly in both South Australia and interstate. Recent projects include the solo exhibition We are not Strangers Here at Hillsmith Gallery, the Sauerbier House residency and associated exhibition, Natural Discourse, and Water Bodies at Floating Goose.
McEwan has twice been a finalist in the Heysen Prize for Landscape, and in 2020 she won Emerging Artist and the Dr Wendy Wickes Memoriam People’s Choice category of the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize.
Rebecca McEwan (@rebeccamcewan.artist) • Instagram photos and videos