Time & Tide

Nicki Rolls has just completed a two-year art residency on the tidal section of the River Crane and adjacent Northcote Nature reserve, making observations from the diverse habitats that envelop the river and nature reserve. She explores wildflowers and weeds that live in inhospitable urban environments, celebrating these often overlooked and rejected plants and inviting the viewer to consider our human relationship with plants and the natural world. Time & Tide presents her charcoal drawings, paintings, sculpture, and video responding to her experience of both the river and its bordering plant life.

Through large-scale charcoal drawings, Rolls captures the physical and emotional character of plants often dismissed as weeds. Her charcoal drawings – marked by smudges, underdrawings, and fragile textures – render blemishes, broken stems, and decaying leaves, as a record of the stresses of living and ageing of the plant. She often includes tangled roots and soil remnants, revealing the struggle for survival as both beautiful and vital.

Using ink made from river water and local oak galls, linen buried under the riverbed and materials recovered from the river, Rolls infuses the work with the landscape’s physical presence. In depictions of plants that exist on its high embankments, she explores their precariousness, on the edge of survival and their dependence on the river. Her paintings evoke the wildness and reprieve offered by this green corridor within the city, while reflecting on the precarious balance that sustains it.

Time & Tide invites reflection on our relationship with nature, resilience in the face of environmental stress, and the urgency of the climate crisis. As the old adage warns, “Time and tide wait for no man” – how will we respond, before it’s too late?