Troy Ruffels: When the World Goes Quiet

‘When the World Goes Quiet’ dwells within the TaKayna/Tarkine, where forest and stone coexist in an evolving dialogue of endurance and transformation. Across these works, the forest is represented not merely as a backdrop but as a living force. Sinkholes, formed over millennia, emerge as both rupture and refuge, the passage of water, root, and stone pressing time beyond its human scale. Within these voids, haunted continually by erosion and renewal, neither hope nor sorrow can be merely carried but are absorbed, reshaped, and softened by the land’s own rhythms.

Through layers of shifting light, dense foliage, through the breath-like undulation of stone, these works seek to evoke a sanctuary neither fixed nor fragile, where time, like water, carves and shifts the contours of what is seen and heard. The TaKayna/Tarkine is not, here, a wildness set apart, but an entanglement of vulnerability and endurance, familiar in near-forgotten ways. It is a vast and listening body where loss, too, finds form.

The exhibition is an offering to the rhythms of place, an engagement with the impermanence of form and the deep interconnections, for ourselves, between landscape and emotion. Not as witness, but as part of this movement, the works acknowledge a landscape that is not static, not passive, but an active presence. Here, the earth breathes, listens and reshapes with room enough for us to recognise ourselves within it, of it, should we choose.

Troy Ruffels 2025