Stephanie Tabram: The River

opening night, THURSDAY 5 MARCH, 2026 

The river rises above Lake St Clair at the confluence of the Narcissus and Cuvier Rivers. From an elevation of 738 metres, it travels approximately 240 kilometres south-east before entering Storm Bay. Along its course, it gathers the waters of numerous rivers, creeks and streams from Tasmania’s largest watershed, spanning nearly 8,900 square kilometres and encompassing the Central Highlands, the Southern Midlands and the Wellington Range.

This vast hydrological system has sustained life for millennia. It nourishes ecosystems, supplies water, enables passage and underpins industry. Over the past two centuries, the river has been dammed, diverted and regulated in service of colonial and industrial priorities. Yet I do not understand the river solely through measurements of flow or productivity; to do so is to overlook its complexity, agency and presence.

Water holds memory. The Derwent - timtumili mananya - carries layered histories of place, movement and care. Long before its banks were reshaped, its cycles were understood and respected by the first peoples who lived with and alongside it. These relationships endure within the river’s continuing rhythms and seasonal patterns.

At the threshold where freshwater meets salt, the river asserts its agency through dynamic and adaptive processes. Pools surface within reclaimed land in response to tidal and lunar cycles, while subterranean flows sustain feeding grounds for waterfowl and subtly reshape terrain beneath fields and roads. These processes continue ecological and geological patterns that predate human intervention by millennia.

When the watershed is brim-filled and spillways and floodgates are opened to release water downstream, the river carries with it the material and sediment of heavily forested places and wide-open valleys. These histories are evident in the dark, swirling, foam-flecked waters that pass beneath the Derbyshire Rocks at New Norfolk.

For more than fifteen years, I have lived above the river where estuarine waters meet mountain streams. Walking the river has become a daily ritual and a foundational component of my practice, undertaken prior to entering the studio. Through sustained observation, the river’s shifting moods - its light, colour and movement - have become central to my work.

This exhibition arises from an ongoing relationship with the river and offers a meditation on water as a living system - one that connects past and present, land and memory, and observation with making.

 - Stephanie Tabram, 2026

Stephanie Tabram, born in the United Kingdom, presently living and working outside of Hobart is one of Tasmania’s most collected artists. Tabram has been painting for more than thirty years, having completed her studies in Sydney in 1989. Her exquisite paintings speak of the Tasmanian landscape like no others. They are the landscapes of only this morning and yet, are evocative of the quality of image reserved only for memory. The paintings are lit —like the heaving Australian sky— from within. The detail and perfection of shadow and reflection goes beyond the photographic, her paintings are truly aglow.

Tabram’s work plays masterfully with the eternal nature of the traditional landscape painting and the instantaneous and transparent quality of film. Her images — though still, private, almost lonely —are pregnant with suspense. Tabram lets us linger in the last of the golden light on the dry grass before the clouds roll over - and then in the thick air of those swelling clouds the moment just before the storm breaks - and then in the silence of the empty highway, silver with the recent rain and lined with puddles as still as glass.  

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