Residency report: Catherine Polcz

" ... Sharing some reflections on our peaceful and inspired time at Gunyah and Worimi Country. My practice seeks to create connection to environment, climate and nature. I have a multi-platform practice, and create in the mediums of audio, installation and curation of objects. Alongside my art practice, my professional career started in ecology before moving into creative producing at institutions – and I consider the creation of programs that create community around environment, connection to nature, or open up discourse an important part of my creative practice. 

Catherine Polcz's family at Gunyah

I travelled to Gunyah with my partner and our two sons – age 3 years and 8 months. Upon our arrival we were immediately taken by the beauty of the Country and all the love that has gone into the house!

Over the two weeks, we fell into a routine where my partner and sons would explore the beaches of Hawks Nest and the Tea Gardens during the day and I could go work in the studio overlooking the cove. In the afternoon we walked through the fire trails and had dinner together.

Catherine Polcz's family on the Gunyah jetty

  

While at Gunyah I did some planning, research and post-production on my conversation series/podcast Plant Kingdom. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment, featuring scientists, artists, researchers and writers. I produce and host the series, and it has been a way to find my voice in my own work again after a decade of producing for institutions and to connect with and learn from people whose work I admire. The project, mostly about plants, also acts as a reminder that we live in their world, the world plants made when they oxygenated our atmosphere, terraformed the planet and provided the basis for all animal life. Everyday we get to live in a Kingdom of Plants. Our archive is at plantkingdom.earth or can be followed on any podcast platform.

Catherine Polcz, Gunyah studio

 

Week 1: Curiously, my Plant Kingdom projects were converging on extinction and rupture. I was editing a conversation with Western Sydney University researcher Dr Josh Wodak on his work Petrified: Life during a rupture on earth and editing our conversation about deep time, and the dramatic swings of life on our planet over millions of years. I recorded a conversation with Alberta based paleontologist Dr Emily Bamforth, whose life work is on understanding the fate and world of a herd of dinosaurs (Pachyrhinosaurus). One day some 65+mya an unknown disaster struck the herd, killing some 10,000 individuals. Their fossilized bones lie alongside Pipestone Creek in Canada, and she imagines how they lived and recreates their world through her work. I was also reading Reverend Barbara Allen’s beautiful new work Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds in preparation for a future conversation. Her work memorialises 31 recently extinct animals. Imagined and written from the animals’ perspective, it builds empathetic ties with the lost St Helena’s Earwig, Quagga, Stellar’s Sea Cow amongst others.

Catherine Polcz, North Arm Cove trees

 

During our second week we did some exploring further out. We spent time in the nearby Myall Lakes National Park, swimming in the lakes and paying homage to Grandis, NSW’s tallest tree. The 400-year-old tree, a member of Eucalyptus grandis, started life as a seedling around 1625. It has survived extensive logging in the area and today stands 70m tall above the rainforest canopy.

Catherine Polcz, NSW’s tallest tree

The second week I had more mental space to revisit a past project and I was leafing through Mary White’s incredible work the Greening of Gondwana. As a Canadian botanist, moving to Australia was incredibly humbling and inspiring. Ten years later, reframing my relationship to Australian flora and building knowledge and understanding is a long-term personal project. Being here has also inspired other questions – using plants as a way to time travel, to understand evolution and the deep rifts in the flora of different parts of our planet. Considering deep evolutionary time has been part of this personal journey of meaning making.

Gunyah gave me space to reconsider a project that looks back into the plants of the Permian period – some 200mya ago. The Permian is the name of a geologic era – a period where earth was swampy, with shallow seas and dominated by a flora of giant club mosses, tree ferns and extinct lineages of plants. The earliest reptile ancestors were cruising the earth yet to diversify into modern reptiles, mammals, dinosaurs, and birds. There were no flowering plants. It is both a familiar and foreign time, still earth, but millions of years before humans shaped it. The decomposition of plants in this era formed the abundant coal reserves around NSW. I am interested in the relationship between these plants, their fossilized carbon and the climate crisis and how to tell this story through objects, documentation, video and writing.

Catherine Polcz, studio experiment at Gunyah

 

I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have spent time at beautiful Gunyah and to have been able to bring my partner and sons. Participating in residencies is a huge challenge for artist parents and carers, where it is common for children to not be allowed on-site. We felt so welcomed at Gunyah.

Catherine Polcz, studio experiment at Gunyah

 

Having had the chance to spend two weeks in such proximity with nature and to focus on practice was both nourishing and productive! I have come back to Sydney with such renewed focus and energy and new questions to pursue. ..."

Catherine Polcz and son, Gunyah residency

Gunyah residency report, November 2025

Catherine Polcz @cpolcz @plantkingdom.earth

catherinepolcz.com plantkingdom.earth

 

Residency report: Ren Gregorčič

" ... During this residency I concentrated on the narrow zone where asphalt shifts into gravel and soil. I drove the same country roads on many occasions and mounted a camera to the passenger-side mirror, tilted downward so the frame held the surface at the road’s edge. This repeated route became a kind of moving studio. Each day the strip at the edge of the seal shifted under different light, temperature, and traffic, and began to appear less as a margin and more as a seam where several material processes met. The area drew my attention because it combined pressure and fragility, order and erosion, in a single continuous line. The edge felt like a question laid into the road. Alongside this work I read Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. His description of the observer as something formed within arrangements of surfaces, instruments, and habits gave structure to what I was doing on these drives. Each excursion placed me inside a constellation that included the car, the mirror, the road surface, the position of the camera, and the established protocols of movement along those roads. The edge of the asphalt became a point in this constellation where attention intensified. There, the relation between perception and its technical and institutional supports moved from background to foreground. I began to treat each drive as a small inquiry into how vision emerges from a field of constraints and affordances rather than from an isolated act of will.

Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency

The filming sessions produced a close study of how the edge accumulates marks of contact and change. Heat opened fissures in the seal, water carved small channels, tyres drew out feathered rims of loose aggregate, plant growth pressed into cracks and joins. The line read less as a simple crossing from “road” to “not-road” and more as an event that carries the history of many small encounters. Boundaries in this context appeared as formations that depend on work, decision, and repair. This raised a philosophical question that informed my thinking throughout the residency: when a limit depends on continuous labour to hold its form, how should we understand its claim to permanence, and what kind of responsibility accompanies that claim?

Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency

Crary’s account of modern visuality, in which seeing is redistributed across devices, surfaces, and institutional logics, resonated with the experience of watching the edge through the mirror while the car moved. The act of looking emerged from the relation between bodily sensation, mechanical vibration, the weight of the vehicle, the curvature of the road, and the small adjustments needed to keep the line within the frame. The observer in this project appeared as a set of movements and judgements that shifted with terrain, speed, light, and weather. Perception felt less like a fixed capacity and more like an effect of cooperation between body and apparatus. The residency created time to register this cooperation, and to consider what it means for any philosophical account of experience. The edge began to function as an instrument for thought. Each drive produced feedback about the stability of the arrangement I was working within. The rumble of tyres on the outer strip, the narrowing of the sealed surface, the fading of paint, and the patchwork of repairs all signalled changes in how the road met the ground that supported it. These signals pointed to a larger theme: structures reveal their principles most clearly where they approach their limits. The road’s edge condensed questions about form, contact, and endurance. How long can a given order hold under the pressures that meet it. What kinds of adjustment are considered acceptable, and which fractures signal a need for new decisions.

Ren Gregorčič, still from filming session, Gunyah residency

Over the course of the residency, this project evolved into an exploration of perception as something shaped through ongoing interaction with specific material and technical ensembles. Thought arose through movement and repetition rather than withdrawal. The mirror, the camera, the car, and the edge formed a configuration that generated questions about orientation and the formation of the observer.  How do available paths shape what becomes visible?  What forms of understanding emerge when attention turns toward zones where systems thin and loosen?  How might philosophy proceed when it begins not from an abstract subject but from a strip of asphalt that records the meeting of structure and world? ..."

Gunyah residency report, October 2025

Ren Gregorčič @ren.gregorcic www.rengregorcic.com