Alexander Boynes: Rising Tide
13 February - 14 March 2026
Rising Tide brings together a new body of works featuring a major drawing, painting, and moving-image collaboration with an original score by cellist and composer Tristen Parr. The exhibition reflects on Port Kembla and the Illawarra as places where industry, ecology, labour, and memory are tightly entangled. Long defined by steelmaking and heavy manufacturing, this landscape has first and foremost always been Dharawal Country—shaped over millennia by coastal systems, wetlands, and escarpments, and more recently by the forces of extraction, colonialism, migration, and industrial modernity.
The steelworks has been a vital part of Australia’s industrial foundation, providing essential materials that underpin contemporary life—from infrastructure and housing to transport and energy systems. It has also been a place of work for generations of people whose labour, skill, and endurance have shaped both the region and the nation. Rising Tide pays homage to these workers, acknowledging the dignity and complexity of labour within an industry that has delivered both prosperity and profound environmental cost.
The paintings depict fractured, unstable views of the steelworks and its surrounds. Forms appear partially erased or broken apart, as if seen through night vision, industrial glare, or the afterimage of intense heat. Figures and structures hover between presence and dissolution, suggesting endurance and precarity, labour and loss. These are not documentary images, but atmospheric composites in which industrial modernity, deep geological time, and an uncertain ecological future collapse into the same pictorial plane.
Rising Tide also acknowledges Port Kembla as a site of significant social and political struggle. The steelworks has been central to workers’ rights movements, migrant labour histories, and feminist activism—including the pivotal campaigns of women in industry, powerfully documented in Women of Steel. These histories sit alongside the material presence of the works themselves, reminding us that industry is never only about production, but about people, solidarity, and collective action.
The title Rising Tide speaks not only to sea-level rise and the climate crisis, but to an accumulation of pressure—environmental, social, and moral—that can no longer be deferred. While recognising the historic and ongoing importance of steelmaking, the exhibition insists on the urgent need to transition to cleaner, more sustainable forms of production, including Green Steel manufacturing. Such a transition is essential if the industry—and the communities that depend on it—are to have a viable future within a rapidly warming world.
This exhibition marks a continuation of Boynes’ long-standing engagement with industrial landscapes and the Anthropocene, while also representing a personal return to the Illawarra—a region central to his own history and to the legacy of his late mother, artist Mandy Martin. Rising Tide asks how art might bear witness to transformation: holding space for grief, respect, and beauty, while insisting on responsibility, justice, and the possibility of change.