Still capture by Kim Goldsmith showing a closeup of tree trunk and pine needles. banner image

Art exhibition: A Love Letter - Kim V. Goldsmith

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Where: Basil Sellers Exhibition Centre, corner Vulcan Street and Murray Street, Moruya

Opening hours: Monday to Saturday, 10am – 4pm. Access from Murray Street after 12.30pm on Saturdays.

I’ve been coming to the South Coast of NSW for three decades, and for many of those years, I’ve felt like a stranger in a foreign land. As someone who has lived on the Western Plains of NSW most of my life, salt and sand sits uncomfortably on my skin. While most of the family would drift towards the ocean and the beach during extended stays at South Durras, I’d head into the forests and hills, and sometimes the headlands, leaning into the sounds of the smooth and furrowed-bark giants - witnesses to not just my 30 years here, but many generations before me. And, while I’m still a stranger on these lands of the Yuin Nation, with time, I’ve come to be at peace with myself here.

My starting point for this body of work was getting to know more about the endangered ecological communities of the southeast corner bioregion that the coast and hinterland of the Eurobodalla are part of. However, as my creative explorations deepened, the more personal and intimate it became.

The foundation work of this collection, A Love Letter is a soundscape composition and video that conveys my deep respect and enduring connection to the more-than-human inhabitants of this region, individually and collectively as connected communities that have been a constant for me over the decades - providing solace, refuge, a place to learn and reflect.

My family’s connection to Durras is captured in the images on the liner notes of cassette tapes in the Mixed Tape Summers installation, as well as in the soundscape and video work, Float - originally produced with my daughter at Durras Lake in the summer of 2013/14, re-edited in 2025.

The spectrogram images that make up the work A forest of sound are visual representations of the sound recordings of individual trees and forests, including the Murramarang National Park and Clyde River National Park. Some of these sub-surface sounds are not often revealed to human ears, emanating deep inside the trees and the soils that hold them fast.

The rich diversity of sounds in the natural world captured in these works are part of my love letter to the more-than-human species whose lives and future are entangled with ours. They are my collaborators. For all the destruction we have wrought upon fragile environments in the name of advancing our species, we depend upon these ‘others’. We are inexorably part of nature, and this tribute to that world is deeply personal.

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