Troy Ruffels - Stone Tides Weeping Trees

Next date: Friday, 30 January 2026 | 05:30 PM to 08:00 PM

Stone Tides Weeping Trees is a visual and poetic meditation on the Miena Cider Gums of Tasmania’s central highland plateau. These eucalypts, resilient yet vulnerable, occupy a singular place in the Tasmanian psyche, enduring one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes in Australia. In their trunks and hollows, they stand as archivists of weather and memory, holding the story of a land shaped by wind, frost, drought and fire.

Walking the plateau I am met a quiet weight in the air. A melancholy formed by absence, by the sensation of something slipping, thinning, almost gone. The Cider Gums carry the span of living time in rings, sap and scar, yet so many now lie silent. Those still standing lean into change, their persistence strained and luminous.

As Robert Macfarlane reflects in Underland:“When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert… Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.” Through this lens, the work contemplates fragility, endurance and the slow unravelling of an ecosystem in transition -an archive written in bark rather than ink.

Stone Tides Weeping Trees is intended to form both elegy and witness: a call to look closely, to listen to the stories these trees still hold, and to recognise the delicate interdependencies that bind us to place. In attending to them, we are reminded of our responsibility to care for what endures, and to safeguard what remains.

Troy Ruffels -August 2023

 

About:

Troy Ruffels’ work is characterised by its subtly intertwined layers, where observations of the natural landscape are overlain in a richly textured palimpsest. Marked by hand and eye, these landscapes are simultaneously interior and exterior. They emerge from a deep familiarity with place, revisited as both inhabitant and traveller, a perspective informed by Ruffels’ anchoring within the North West of Tasmania and his movements around the island.

Each work bears the intensity of a specific location and moment while resonating with wider connections and concerns: we glimpse a luminous world where the visible surface is invested with the halo of the unseen.

 

When

Location

Burnie Regional Gallery, Burnie Arts Centre, 77-79 Wilmot st, Burnie, 7320, View Map and directions