IAG Up Late: Flood Lines Discussion

Director, Ipswich Art Gallery 

Kylie Stevens is an Ipswich-based artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the natural environment. Working across diverse multimedia forms, she embraces flexibility in her artistic expression, reflecting a profound connection with and reverence for nature.

Through her work, Kylie seeks to highlight the beauty and transformative power of the natural world, inspiring viewers to develop a deeper appreciation for and commitment to protecting our precious natural spaces.

Dr Margaret Cook is an Ipswich-based environmental historian and author of A River with a City Problem. Her work draws on documentary research and oral history to write and tell histories of waterways and climate.

She is fascinated by the complex relationships between humans and the environment over time. Margaret hopes that her work instils a deeper understanding of our history of floods.

Simon Cleary is a writer and the author of three novels, including The Comfort of Figs (2008), which was published after the manuscript was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. His second novel, Closer to Stone (2012), was inspired by his experiences in North Africa at the commencement of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Simon’s third novel, The War Artist, was published in 2019.

Everything is Water is his first work of non-fiction. Shaped by Simon’s 344 kilometre journey by foot along the banks of the Brisbane River from its source to Moreton Bay, Everything is Water considers our complex relationship with nature through flood, drought, time and place, and explores the ways rivers connect landscapes, ecologies, histories, communities and myth.