" ... We arrived at North Arm Cove and Gunyah at night in the rain and spent the first few days discovering where we were. We began with the water, paddling our kayaks around the Baromee peninsula and up North Arm Cove on a beautiful, sunny, windless day. The combination of light bouncing off the waves and the sounds of people and birds travelling across the water was hypnotic, inviting us into a dreamy observing headspace, so important to our work. It’s incredible to be able to step out of the house and studio onto the water, float with the tides, and just simply watch the world pass. Here began our Dérive, or drifting on unguided journeys through a landscape.
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| David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Dunes, 2026 |
Our field trips continued for the rest of the week, and we rode bikes along the residual trails of the Walter Burley Griffin plan, for a visionary Port Stephens City and thought a lot about the concept of a paper subdivision, the meaning of the legalities of it all and the 4000 lots of technically non-residential land. The hidden potential of this imaginary landscape is sustained by occasional interventions that are improvisational and seem to skirt the boundaries of council rules and regulations, a bricolage occupation (so rare against the real estate crisis) and yet the landscape is layered with a history of Indigenous occupation and ceremonial places such as the Baromee Hill site. Yet as present as the dream of a city and the history are, they are only partially existent, ghosts upon ghosts; psychogeographic thinking looms large in this environment.
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| David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Dunes, 2026 |
We walked across the incredible coastal Sand Dunes on the east coast between Hawks Nest and Mugo Brush, and contemplated sleeping at the rocky headland of Yacaabah Head with the dingoes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible on this trip, but we are keen for another time. The dunes are timeless and full of temporal effects; it is entropy and negentropy at play here as the invisible wind facilitates the appearance and disappearance of patterns and traces in the sand, opening the way for thoughts on weather systems in virtual environments, and the sorts of things that tie form and function to presence and absence. A kind of mapping of the Invisible. The full-spectrum infrared camera rendered our imaginations onto another planetary world altogether. Suddenly, we were no longer on Earth but on a new, unnamed planet. This is why, for us, walking outside often leads to experiences equally as vivid as the wildest science fiction.
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| David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Rockpool, 2026 |
Further afield, the volcanic rock formations on the southern side of Port Stephens are utterly dreamlike and hold imaginative signs and significance in their composition. Here is a kind of negentropic process that resides in what the mind is capable of constructing, unlike the one in photosynthesis, where a plant takes chaotic, raw sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and actively uses energy to structure them into highly ordered sugars and plant matter. Here, the effects of entropy established by the wind, sun, water temperature, and weather work together not only to decompose the rock but also to create new geometric forms that enter our perception. Watching all these different flows of low- and high-entropy states in action inspires all kinds of ideas about negentropy and how it forms bridges between physics, biology, and information: Here we have country, a landscape that is seemingly unknowable, yet it produces things inside us. A circle of lichens, growth patterns, and weathering patterns, hidden functionality and significances yet to be discerned. Documenting, recording, and collecting field data on these structures, signs, patterns, and formations is an important source of inspiration for our work in the game engine space, where we are developing speculative environmental techne in art.
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| David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Wind Grass, 2026 |
Gunyah as a residency carries all these energies. A space, place, and time to allow observation, collation, planning, testing, visualising, reflecting, and experimentation. It carries the spirit of a collective for lots of people, something rare in this world. As a meeting place, the name perfectly captures the generosity of spirit that has made it a sanctuary for people all these years. ... "
