Staying with the Trouble is an evolving process of exploration by Linda Dening, Kim Mahood, Sally Simpson and Wendy Teakel, four senior practitioners in concert with each other. This exhibition presents all new work shaped as a result of an extraordinary residency experience at Bibbaringa regenerative farm at Bowna NSW.

Essay
Dr Lee-Anne Hall

Staying with the Trouble is an evolving collaborative project of enquiry
between artists Linda Dening, Kim Mahood, Sally Simpson and Wendy
Teakel. Their purpose is to explore environmental inter-connectedness and
crisis through their creative practices. In its second exhibition iteration:
Staying With the Trouble - Regeneration, the artists situated their practice at
Bibbaringa regenerative farm. Here, they were challenged by farmer Gill
Sandbrook to experience and creatively respond to the farm environment and
sustainable practices. The result is a record of place, passion and renewal.
In the words of artist John Wolsley, farmer Gill Sandbrook is an artist, whose canvas
is the land. She came to Bibbaringa on the south west slopes of NSW, in 2007.
Here was a place of bare rolling hills, denuded valleys and weed filled pastures
degraded by intensive farming practices. Gill sought to work with the land, not
against it. To heal it, to return it to itself. The task she set herself was enormous,
involving farming practices which included reducing the stock load, planting trees,
renovating paddocks and shaping the land to hold water and increase flows across
the land. Bibbaringa is now a place where productive farming coincides with bird
song, returned wetlands, native grasses and self seeded trees which pepper valley
floors, and hold the banks of flowing creeks.
Gill holds title over the land, but sees herself as a custodian, not merely owner – the
difference being temporal. She is here, and one day she will not be. While she is
here, she is responsible, and she will act in its favour. She will set a forward path for
others. Gill’s statement of purpose for Bibbaringa underpins her practice:
‘To be prosperous financially and environmentally and contribute socially. To
produce high quantity and quality of nourishing resources. To build the ecology,
animals and people to Sing, HUMMM in harmony.
To have a balance of rural, commercial & financial investments. A balanced
lifestyle that is authentic and embraces individuality, creativity and holistic
thinking.
Show love, gratitude and respect.’

A driving force of the art and regenerative farming organisation Earth Canvas, Gill
situates herself as a facilitator for change. She invites artists to Bibbaringa each year
to spend time in the landscape, to learn about regenerative practices and to
communicate this learning through art. An invitation was extended by Gill to Staying
With the Trouble artists, following their award winning environmental exhibition,
Staying With The Trouble held at the Belconnen Arts Centre and Wagga Wagga Art
Gallery in 2023. The artists had adopted feminist environmental philosopher Donna
Haraway’s 2016 book title Staying with the Trouble as both exhibition title, but also
as a work process, a means to collectively ‘think’ through the Anthropocene created
environmental crisis, with art making as an instrument of challenge and change.

The artists accepted Gill’s invitation and in October 2024 spent a week at
Bibbaringa. For Staying with the Trouble artists the opportunity to be in residence at
Bibbaringa offered an intense period of working alongside each other; literally
‘staying with the trouble’ engaging with specific place and practice.
As Director of Wagga Wagga Art Gallery I visited the artists at Bibbaringa, in the
renovated former wool shed, now a communal space being used as a studio. They
had set up at easels and on tables around the room. Some artworks were placed on
the floor, others pinned to the wall. They were at the near end of their week and the
work was taking shape. At this early stage it was evident each artist had approached
from various viewpoints and understanding.
We took a brief walk outside through lush grass to feel the earth underfoot. The
ground was soft – alive. After a while each artist peeled off in different directions.
Kim up the hill and over, Sally to the shearer’s hut, and Wendy returned to the
studio. I followed Linda over to a large kurrajong where she had set up camp. Her
swag was in the shade of the tree. The tree had cast its spell upon her. For days
she sat underneath it and drew, she looked up at its branches and imagined another
time. She slept under it and peeked at the stars and felt the cold and listened to the
rustle and the visiting birds. Why this tree? It was old, many hundreds of years. It
had survived the years of fire and drought, of land clearing and the fell of the axe to
build fences and houses. It had survived and it would see more years.
The tree would become the focus of Linda’s work – a metaphor for what was once,
what could be and what would be once again. The tree and the land it was rooted in
would see the humans out. At Bibbaringa the land – exhausted just 20 years
previous - was healing.
Taking note of where each artist was heading in their work, I hopped in my car and
returned to Wagga Wagga. It would be another year before I would meet with the
artists again, this time at Womboin, near Canberra, where they had gathered in Sally
and Kim’s studio to reveal the near completion of the project. Evident was the
distinctive work of each artist, but bringing it together a simple truth - this is an
exhibition as much about a singular person, with passion, belief, and felt obligation,
as it is about land and regenerative environmental practices.
Sally Simpson’s charcoal drawings are cascading scrolls which suggest both the
topographic fall of land and water. Within each work a human shadow is cast. The
shadow is of Gill, the one who curates place, whose mark is upon the land. These
shadows also recognise millennia of human presence, of living in harmony with and
shaping place and conversely the darker shadow of the Anthropocene. In this era
humans have taken the trees that stabilise the earth and offer habitat, they have dug
it up, put chemicals upon it, and killed and soured the soil. In ignorance and greed
they have over stocked and overgrazed, they have created monocultures, burned
fossil fuels and heated the planet so few can survive. So much has been lost. In
Sally Simpson’s work this terrible picture is reworked by the artist to honour one
human who seeks to do otherwise and to remind us that in the face of environmental
history, human presence is fleeting. Nature left to her devices, will reclaim the earth.

Wendy Teakel’s series of pastel, charcoal and pokerwork drawings follow her
decades long practice of observing cultivated agricultural land practices; the traces
made by tractors and harvesters, and broad acre plantings which leave a bruised
earth. Inserted in this body of works are bold graphic forms – somewhat mysterious
and runic in character, they dance above sketches of delicate blown grass and seed
heads, mycelium threads / the fungal colonies which tell of healthy soil. A closer
interrogation reveals these graphic forms to not be ancient portentous symbols, but
to indicate paddocks, their strange shapes drawn up by Gill. They are a refutation of
the old farm paddock with long straight fence lines to hold and manage cattle. Gill
redrew the land to create over 100 paddocks, each to follow the curve of the land, to
enhance the natural flow of water and for cattle to be regularly moved and the land to
be rested with time to recover from footfall and pasture loss.
In her privileging of these paddock shapes, the artist affirms the curatorial practice
and success of the farmer. The shapes which ‘dance’ across each work represent
the beat and pulse of a healthy thriving landscape.
Perhaps most telling of this landscape in full bloom are the rich green, blues and
lavender toned works of Kim Mahood. These works in pastel and oils are a surprise
from an artist who is most comfortable with the sparse landscapes and red and
orange hues of arid Australia. In conversation and in her artist statement Mahood
remarks that she felt deeply challenged to consider the unfamiliar at Bibbaringa. In
doing so she has leaned into the abstracted roots of Modernist landscape painting to
produce loose and rolling undulations, blowing trees and deep shadows. Paddocks
appear as patchwork, a bird’s eye view of all that is below. Here Bibbaringa is
verdant, glorious and pulsating, and here the triumph of Gill Sandbrook’s
achievement is fully expressed.
In viewing Staying with the Trouble – Regeneration, audiences are invited to engage
further with author Donna Haraway’s seminal text and ideas Staying with the Trouble
– Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2022).

Dr Lee-Anne Hall
November 2025