The Land Is Never Still, The Water Is Never Quiet takes its title from a Khmer proverb that reflects a worldview in which land and water are alive, spiritual, and constantly shifting.

As a Cambodian–Australian artist, this understanding is both cultural and personal. I experience place not only as a physical location, but as something felt and carried, shaped by absence, and layered with memory, ancestry, and spiritual significance. The works emerge from this sense of movement and return.

Across painting, sculpture, textile and moving image, the exhibition reflects on memory, identity, spirituality, and ecology. It considers what is remembered and what is missing, and how landscape, ritual, and material can hold what has been disrupted or lost. The Cambodian landscape is approached as a site of inheritance, marked by personal and collective histories, as well as quiet forms of resilience.

The works are grounded in both material and process. I work with earth pigment, rice sacks, plant dyes, Khmer silk, thread, and water hyacinth, materials that carry cultural weight and spiritual resonance. The colour gamboge appears throughout. Derived from the resin of the gamboge tree and historically associated with Cambodia, it becomes a chromatic anchor for memory, place, and identity.

Many of the works are shaped through acts of gathering, layering, weaving, and stitching. These gestures reflect care, repetition, and persistence, and position making as a way of tending to what might otherwise be lost.

This project is an ongoing attempt to remain connected to place, not only through geography, but through story, ritual, and memory.