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The Memory of Trees
Thursday, May 28 @ 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM
An Exhibition by Heloise Roberts & Moira Fearby
May 28 to June 26
Exhibition Launch: Thursday, June 4, 6-8pm
Roberts and Fearby met as teenagers at art school and have since developed a collaborative practice interrogating place, identity, and environmental consciousness. Their work has received several awards, including the 2025 Ludlow Landscape Prize, the 2013 Black Swan Heritage Prize for Living City, and the Castaways Sculpture Award Sustainability Prize in 2021 and 2023 for Pathogen and Insidious respectively. They have been finalists in the Black Swan Portrait Prize (2014, 2016) and the 2024 Perth Royal Art Prize for Landscape with Echoes of Duality—Sugarloaf Rock. Most recently, they were selected for Tracework, a survey of contemporary art in the Southwest at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery.
In 2024, they began a series of large-scale landscapes evoking memory and place. Crafted from drawn and painted plywood tiles, these works imbue iconic views with nostalgia. Their modular construction allows for both cohesion and dissonance, mirroring how collective and individual experiences of place diverge and merge.
Their work reimagines landscape as an active collaborator—shaping identity through memory, materiality, and movement. The exhibition, The Memory of Trees, traces these entangled geographies, where place becomes a site of shared belonging that invites viewers to reflect on their own spatial narratives. This body of work extends their fascination with the natural landscape that has shaped them, exploring how familiarity and distance shape memory.
In an era of climate anxiety, The Memory of Trees, offers an alternative mode of engagement with the natural world. These works do not shout or accuse; they ask viewers to remember what they love—and to consider, quietly, what it would mean to lose it. This is art as gentle witness.
The artists’ earlier work engaged more directly with environmental threat. Pathogen and Insidious confronted viewers with the slow, creeping damage of ecological change. In The Memory of Trees, they have turned toward what is precious, what is worth protecting, what is already being carried forward in memory.
