Seven Forms (Geraldton '26) brought together seven Perth-based artists to encounter the coastal city of Geraldton and the Mid West region of Western Australia. The exhibition explored a region in transition at a moment when sustainable futures ask something of us all. Learn more...
To extend the conversation beyond the gallery walls we invited members of Writers of the Coral Coast to respond to the exhibition in their own words. Working across essay, fiction and poetry, they each brought a personal encounter with the artworks and the landscapes that shaped them. The texts offer new ways of seeing the work and the region it reflects.
The five responses published here were selected by the Seven Forms artists and curator. We are delighted to share them, and grateful to the members of Writers of the Coral Coast for their generosity and imagination.
To extend the conversation beyond the gallery walls we invited members of Writers of the Coral Coast to respond to the exhibition in their own words. Working across essay, fiction and poetry, they each brought a personal encounter with the artworks and the landscapes that shaped them. The texts offer new ways of seeing the work and the region it reflects.
The five responses published here were selected by the Seven Forms artists and curator. We are delighted to share them, and grateful to the members of Writers of the Coral Coast for their generosity and imagination.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Lorraine Chapman, President of Writers of the Coral Coast, for facilitating this writing project; to the members of Writers of the Coral Coast for their participation and their thoughtful responses to the exhibition; and to Geraldton Regional Art Gallery for providing the writers with access to the venue.
With thanks to Lorraine Chapman, President of Writers of the Coral Coast, for facilitating this writing project; to the members of Writers of the Coral Coast for their participation and their thoughtful responses to the exhibition; and to Geraldton Regional Art Gallery for providing the writers with access to the venue.
Monika Lukowska-Appel, The palimpsest coast: erosion and persistence (I & II), 2026, 80 x 120 cm, Digital print, graphite and silver ink on Hahnemühle German etching paper.
Perfect Fruit
By Trish Anderson
[Inspired by Monika Lukowska’s artwork The Palimpsest Coast: erosion and persistence I & II.]
The bush was green as Sam turned off the highway and navigated expertly along the overgrown track. The vegetation became sparse, healthy trees interspersed with dead ones, but by the time they reached the orchards the land was barren. All the trees were dead, some lying rotting into the dirt. As the wind blew, only dust swirled from ground, there was no sound of rustling leaves, spindly trunks and broken branches swayed precariously as if they were going to lose their balance at any moment. When Sam and his son Travis got out of the car there were no bird calls, no aroma of ripening apples, just a dead silence and the smell of death.
“What happened to the trees Dad?”
“No-one really knew.” Sam replied flatly.
“How can that happen?” Travis frowned.
Sam walked through the rows of trees rubbing his hands along the split, grey bark.
“Dad was always in charge of the spraying programme, he always kept up with new chemicals, not wanting to harm workers and wildlife, but out of the blue he got more and more obsessed with producing the perfect fruit. He inspected every piece, looking for blemishes."
The words spilled out as if they were finally being set free.
“The last time the trees were sprayed Dad was locked in the study with the pilot of the airplane for ages but Dad was tight-lipped. Whatever was said stayed between the walls.
The spray was pungent. Many of us had sore eyes and the cuts on our arms from working with the trees stung. But dad told us we were imagining things. Everything was ok in the orchard until the trees began to look sickly, burnt tips and yellowing leaves. Fruit started dropping from the trees.
We tried to contact the pilot, but he had disappeared along with twice his usual payment.
Dad, the man who could name every variety of apple, forgot how to use tools and would wander off into the bush. The insurance was in Dad’s name. They refused to deal with anyone else. And Dad was unable to."
“What happened?” Travis asked
“It just got too much, Mum was busy looking after Dad and honestly, I didn’t care, the orchard wasn’t my thing. After Dad died, we just walked away. You probably don’t remember Mum living with us; you were just a baby. Grieving for her husband and the orchard broke her heart."
“Can we look at the house dad?”
“I don’t know what condition it is in. Maybe some of the garden survived.”
Driving through the barren landscape Sam prepared himself for the worst.
In the distance they could see flashes of orange and green and, as they grew closer, a creeper climbing over the verandah rails and up the walls.
“Mum’s nasturtiums,” breathed Sam. He looked beyond the house. Dead trees . “She always said they’d survive the apocalypse.”
Trish Anderson has been living in Geraldton for 33 years and writing since she joined Writers of the Coral Coast on a whim 13 years ago. During that time she has developed an interest in many styles of writing including novel writing, short Fiction and Memoir. Her first novel has been in development for about 6 years but she hopes to finish it this year. Currently Trish is very interested in the concept of Flash Fiction. Trish would like to thank fellow members of the writing group for their friendship and support.
By Trish Anderson
[Inspired by Monika Lukowska’s artwork The Palimpsest Coast: erosion and persistence I & II.]
The bush was green as Sam turned off the highway and navigated expertly along the overgrown track. The vegetation became sparse, healthy trees interspersed with dead ones, but by the time they reached the orchards the land was barren. All the trees were dead, some lying rotting into the dirt. As the wind blew, only dust swirled from ground, there was no sound of rustling leaves, spindly trunks and broken branches swayed precariously as if they were going to lose their balance at any moment. When Sam and his son Travis got out of the car there were no bird calls, no aroma of ripening apples, just a dead silence and the smell of death.
“What happened to the trees Dad?”
“No-one really knew.” Sam replied flatly.
“How can that happen?” Travis frowned.
Sam walked through the rows of trees rubbing his hands along the split, grey bark.
“Dad was always in charge of the spraying programme, he always kept up with new chemicals, not wanting to harm workers and wildlife, but out of the blue he got more and more obsessed with producing the perfect fruit. He inspected every piece, looking for blemishes."
The words spilled out as if they were finally being set free.
“The last time the trees were sprayed Dad was locked in the study with the pilot of the airplane for ages but Dad was tight-lipped. Whatever was said stayed between the walls.
The spray was pungent. Many of us had sore eyes and the cuts on our arms from working with the trees stung. But dad told us we were imagining things. Everything was ok in the orchard until the trees began to look sickly, burnt tips and yellowing leaves. Fruit started dropping from the trees.
We tried to contact the pilot, but he had disappeared along with twice his usual payment.
Dad, the man who could name every variety of apple, forgot how to use tools and would wander off into the bush. The insurance was in Dad’s name. They refused to deal with anyone else. And Dad was unable to."
“What happened?” Travis asked
“It just got too much, Mum was busy looking after Dad and honestly, I didn’t care, the orchard wasn’t my thing. After Dad died, we just walked away. You probably don’t remember Mum living with us; you were just a baby. Grieving for her husband and the orchard broke her heart."
“Can we look at the house dad?”
“I don’t know what condition it is in. Maybe some of the garden survived.”
Driving through the barren landscape Sam prepared himself for the worst.
In the distance they could see flashes of orange and green and, as they grew closer, a creeper climbing over the verandah rails and up the walls.
“Mum’s nasturtiums,” breathed Sam. He looked beyond the house. Dead trees . “She always said they’d survive the apocalypse.”
Trish Anderson has been living in Geraldton for 33 years and writing since she joined Writers of the Coral Coast on a whim 13 years ago. During that time she has developed an interest in many styles of writing including novel writing, short Fiction and Memoir. Her first novel has been in development for about 6 years but she hopes to finish it this year. Currently Trish is very interested in the concept of Flash Fiction. Trish would like to thank fellow members of the writing group for their friendship and support.
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Layli Rakhsha, Flowing in Silence I & II, 2025, 100 x 100 cm (unframed), Medium Format photograph taken with a Pinhole Camera.
Response to the work of Layli Rakhsha
By JM Cregan
I grew up in southern New South Wales in a remote landscape of estuaries, wild oceans, and deep forests. On weekends I looked forward to my parents getting the Sunday paper, especially the section in the comics lift-out called Spot the Difference, where the reader had to identify changes made between two seemingly identical cartoon panels. I was rarely able to identify all the alterations that had been made, despite my deep immersion in the natural world, that educated my child’s eye more acutely, and in fundamentally different ways from that had I lived in the city. The challenge remained with me as I got older, in aspects of my work, as well as in my interior life, where learning to see the world as it really is, to make sense of the world in all its multiple representations, felt less at times like a matter of professional and personal development, and more like a matter of life and death.
The challenge Layli Rakhsha describes in response to her confrontation with the enormous scale and profound beauty of the Mid-West landscape, then, is a familiar one. How do you make sense of that landscape that has the power to change the way a person situates themselves in the world, account for the land in a way that is not just holding up a personal mirror, with its flaws and distortions, or superimposing one reality over another, part of a process that offers little more than secondary impressions? To be true to one’s own experience yet more than just a storyteller, fixed in place and time?
Ms Rakhsha’s work is inevitably personal, as she admits, but her use of a pin-hole camera, with its infinite depth-of-field, and double exposures, and the delicate drawings that are partial and incomplete, invite more than an individual response to the images she captures, I think. The images' seemingly unmoored quality call for participation in the spirit of the land itself, beyond the viewer’s own experiences and memories of places they may already be familiar with. The effect is unsettling, confronting even, transhistorical and yet reassuringly transpersonal. As a viewer, standing in front of the work, I am drawn back in time, beyond the ubiquitous RVs and caravans that are now an almost permanent feature of Ellendale Pool. Beyond the dislocation of the pastoral leases and dispossession that came with European settlement, disrupting tens of thousands of years of Indigenous occupation and cultural expression.
The images don’t change the history of the places Layli Rakhsha has engaged with, but they change my own understanding of those places, and how I position myself to appreciate and understand them.
JM Cregan has worked extensively as a gardener and garden designer, as well as a teacher of children with special needs and with children at risk. In 2017 he completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle on the imagery of the Garden of Eden. He moved to Geraldton in 2021. He is currently writing a collection of short stories where the landscape of the Mid-West is a powerful defining influence on the various narratives and the characters within.
By JM Cregan
I grew up in southern New South Wales in a remote landscape of estuaries, wild oceans, and deep forests. On weekends I looked forward to my parents getting the Sunday paper, especially the section in the comics lift-out called Spot the Difference, where the reader had to identify changes made between two seemingly identical cartoon panels. I was rarely able to identify all the alterations that had been made, despite my deep immersion in the natural world, that educated my child’s eye more acutely, and in fundamentally different ways from that had I lived in the city. The challenge remained with me as I got older, in aspects of my work, as well as in my interior life, where learning to see the world as it really is, to make sense of the world in all its multiple representations, felt less at times like a matter of professional and personal development, and more like a matter of life and death.
The challenge Layli Rakhsha describes in response to her confrontation with the enormous scale and profound beauty of the Mid-West landscape, then, is a familiar one. How do you make sense of that landscape that has the power to change the way a person situates themselves in the world, account for the land in a way that is not just holding up a personal mirror, with its flaws and distortions, or superimposing one reality over another, part of a process that offers little more than secondary impressions? To be true to one’s own experience yet more than just a storyteller, fixed in place and time?
Ms Rakhsha’s work is inevitably personal, as she admits, but her use of a pin-hole camera, with its infinite depth-of-field, and double exposures, and the delicate drawings that are partial and incomplete, invite more than an individual response to the images she captures, I think. The images' seemingly unmoored quality call for participation in the spirit of the land itself, beyond the viewer’s own experiences and memories of places they may already be familiar with. The effect is unsettling, confronting even, transhistorical and yet reassuringly transpersonal. As a viewer, standing in front of the work, I am drawn back in time, beyond the ubiquitous RVs and caravans that are now an almost permanent feature of Ellendale Pool. Beyond the dislocation of the pastoral leases and dispossession that came with European settlement, disrupting tens of thousands of years of Indigenous occupation and cultural expression.
The images don’t change the history of the places Layli Rakhsha has engaged with, but they change my own understanding of those places, and how I position myself to appreciate and understand them.
JM Cregan has worked extensively as a gardener and garden designer, as well as a teacher of children with special needs and with children at risk. In 2017 he completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle on the imagery of the Garden of Eden. He moved to Geraldton in 2021. He is currently writing a collection of short stories where the landscape of the Mid-West is a powerful defining influence on the various narratives and the characters within.
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Sue Starcken, Barbed Assassins I, II & III, 2026, Ink, Hahnemühle paper.
Mandalas
By Deanne Davies
[based on Sue Starcken's Barbed Assassins series]
Sacred squares flourishing with arabesque
and cruciform with the architecture of domes
containing seeds of eternal cycles
blossom to an anatomical panorama
of vertebrae and human lungs – life
an interplay of human dimensions
with ecosystems.
The micro becomes macro.
Haunting fields – Dominating
as humans do the world
who in their infinite wisdom played God
and introduced Double Gees to sacred earth
the public square, a ground for commerce.
Deanne Davies works in education and pastoral care. In her younger years she was a singer songwriter and released an album. An award-winning poet, her poems have appeared in Verandah, Arena, and Eureka Street Magazines. She judges entries for the Randolf Stow Young Writers Awards facilitated by the Geraldton Regional Library and participates in the Coral Coast writing community. She has lived in Geraldton since 2005.
By Deanne Davies
[based on Sue Starcken's Barbed Assassins series]
Sacred squares flourishing with arabesque
and cruciform with the architecture of domes
containing seeds of eternal cycles
blossom to an anatomical panorama
of vertebrae and human lungs – life
an interplay of human dimensions
with ecosystems.
The micro becomes macro.
Haunting fields – Dominating
as humans do the world
who in their infinite wisdom played God
and introduced Double Gees to sacred earth
the public square, a ground for commerce.
Deanne Davies works in education and pastoral care. In her younger years she was a singer songwriter and released an album. An award-winning poet, her poems have appeared in Verandah, Arena, and Eureka Street Magazines. She judges entries for the Randolf Stow Young Writers Awards facilitated by the Geraldton Regional Library and participates in the Coral Coast writing community. She has lived in Geraldton since 2005.
Alana McVeigh, Botanical Studies I, II & III, 2026, 32x26cm, ink on paper.
Zoom in
By Tracey Snowball
[Response to Botanical Studies 1, 2, 3 by Alana McVeigh]
So many tiny dots
Like ant footprints on white sand
Specks of time and focussed attention
The artist wields ink with precision
And escapes to the place where time has no meaning
Zoom out
Slowly the little black dots coalesce
Into delicate botanical forms
Trailing, lacy, spiky
Echoing the complexity of evolution
Suggestive of a time when plants prevailed
When leaves rustled, insects clicked and hummed
Restful activity
Zoom away
Mind quietened by the contemplation
Eyes opened to the minute details
That coalesce into galaxies
When perspective allows.
Tracey Snowball was born and educated in Geraldton.
She spent her working life in senior administrative roles in retail, government and the TAFE sector, both in Perth and Geraldton.
As a hobby, Tracey has drawn and painted since she was a child. In retirement she continues to create art in pastels, acrylic and mixed media. Tracey’s school reports often commented “writes well for a purpose” and this remains fair comment. Tracey has been involved in various local history writing projects, and she is a member of Writers of the Coral Coast.
By Tracey Snowball
[Response to Botanical Studies 1, 2, 3 by Alana McVeigh]
So many tiny dots
Like ant footprints on white sand
Specks of time and focussed attention
The artist wields ink with precision
And escapes to the place where time has no meaning
Zoom out
Slowly the little black dots coalesce
Into delicate botanical forms
Trailing, lacy, spiky
Echoing the complexity of evolution
Suggestive of a time when plants prevailed
When leaves rustled, insects clicked and hummed
Restful activity
Zoom away
Mind quietened by the contemplation
Eyes opened to the minute details
That coalesce into galaxies
When perspective allows.
Tracey Snowball was born and educated in Geraldton.
She spent her working life in senior administrative roles in retail, government and the TAFE sector, both in Perth and Geraldton.
As a hobby, Tracey has drawn and painted since she was a child. In retirement she continues to create art in pastels, acrylic and mixed media. Tracey’s school reports often commented “writes well for a purpose” and this remains fair comment. Tracey has been involved in various local history writing projects, and she is a member of Writers of the Coral Coast.
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Melanie McKee, Watercourse 6, 2025, 11 x 14 in (unframed), Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Hemp.
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Sarah Robinson, installation view of Us, Pink Noise and Speculative Coding
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Hutt Lagoon
By Sonia Williams
pretty fairy floss pinks
as seen from above its perfect surface
looking like love on coconut ice
tempted to dive into its juicy depths
its perfection that I want to explore
and its harmony with the land around
then finally! step into quicksand
its salty shards stinging lower limbs
midgies biting their succulent reward
pungent smells burn my nose
summer heat biting tender skin
should I have stayed in the car?
now questioning whether to admire
the lakes beauty just from above
but where would the fun be in that?
Sonia Williams is an emerging artist and poet whose work is inspired by the landscapes, flora, and fauna of Western Australia's Mid-West. Currently studying a Diploma of Visual Arts, she works across sculpture, kiln-formed glass, printmaking, textiles, and poetry. Her practice explores resilience, transformation, and the quiet connections between people and the natural world. Drawn to finding beauty in overlooked places, Sonia sees creativity as both a form of storytelling and a way of making sense of the world. This exhibition marks her first published poem.
By Sonia Williams
pretty fairy floss pinks
as seen from above its perfect surface
looking like love on coconut ice
tempted to dive into its juicy depths
its perfection that I want to explore
and its harmony with the land around
then finally! step into quicksand
its salty shards stinging lower limbs
midgies biting their succulent reward
pungent smells burn my nose
summer heat biting tender skin
should I have stayed in the car?
now questioning whether to admire
the lakes beauty just from above
but where would the fun be in that?
Sonia Williams is an emerging artist and poet whose work is inspired by the landscapes, flora, and fauna of Western Australia's Mid-West. Currently studying a Diploma of Visual Arts, she works across sculpture, kiln-formed glass, printmaking, textiles, and poetry. Her practice explores resilience, transformation, and the quiet connections between people and the natural world. Drawn to finding beauty in overlooked places, Sonia sees creativity as both a form of storytelling and a way of making sense of the world. This exhibition marks her first published poem.
Susanna Castleden, 1:1 Wind Turbine Blade (14 RPM), 2026, 97cm x 712cm, Gesso and acrylic on Awagami Kitakata paper.
Proudly supported by the WA Government
