“My passion for the river has never gone away,” says Joanna Dudson Scott, Renwick-based landscape painter and sculptor.
“I’ve lived next to the river. I walk the river. I cycle the river. I just sit in the braided riverbeds quite often when I need to think about things.”
Joanna’s upcoming New Works exhibition at Marlborough Art Gallery Te Kahu o Waipuna, opening on 10 October, celebrates the natural beauty and uniqueness of the South Island’s braided rivers.
Made up of 27 pieces including oil landscape paintings and sculpture developed over several years, the collection is inspired by Joanna’s connection to rivers such as the Wairau and Rakaia.
Majoring in painting at the Otago School of Fine Arts in the 1980s, she says her journeys between family based in Otago and Marlborough, where she crossed various braided rivers, caused her to reflect on their rare and dynamic nature.
“The biggest description I’ve seen for them is that they sway and move. Their banks are really, really movable. So, in a flood, they just go where they need to go,” she explains.
Joanna adds that the role rivers play in our communities is a big influence on her work, as is the need to protect and advocate for them.
When in 2009, the Wairau River damming and hydro proposal was put forward, Joanna and other artists came together in a protest auction.
She explains that many rare, endemic species live on braided rivers. Some are even classed as whole living entities by iwi, such as the Whanganui River in the central North.
“It has a soul, and I really like that idea. And coupled with the rivers being so rare worldwide... they’re under a lot of pressure.”
Her sculpture works celebrate the Wairau and were born out of a trip to the river mouth in the Molesworth region.
With Marlborough’s ecosystems, viticulture and agriculture deeply connected to the river, Joanna says it is ever-present in our everyday lives.
Ultimately, when people view her collection, she says, “I want people to have a sense that they belong here – they relate to being here, and they see familiarity in what they know.”
She hopes her works also conjure people’s “own stories of places they’ve been to, places they’ve seen, and mountains they’ve climbed.”
