'The Grassening' living installation
Plant Suppliers
Growing Illawarra Natives, Landcare Illawarra, Wollongong Botanic Gardens, and others
about
More than grasses...
The Grassening is an immersive living artwork produced for Nature Festival, 12-13th September 2025 at the Servo Port Kembla.
The artwork is a space where plants speak, shadows grow, and the endangered Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland is amplified with sound, drawing and multimedia.
On Dharawal Wodi Wodi Country, The Grassening invites audiences into the living, breathing presence of an Illawarra grassy woodland, amplified through sound, wall drawing, and multimedia. At the heart of the installation is an intimate collaboration with plants, listening to their subtle electrical voices and translating these into immersive sonic environments.
Using a device that reads the minute electromagnetic fluctuations of leaves and stems through paired electrodes, Smede transforms these electrochemical signals into musical notes via a generative algorithm. These raw tonal patterns, shaped by the plant’s own shifting states: light, temperature, hydration, and relationships with the surrounding ecosystem, are converted into layered soundbeds, each carrying the unique “song” of an individual plant.
Recent scientific insights affirm that plants possess over fifteen senses, continuously interpreting and responding to their environment through complex electrochemical reactions. In The Grassening, these fluctuations become music that evolves in real time, changing with the plant’s lived experience. A eucalypt in dappled sun will sound different to one after rain; a tuft of native grass will sing uniquely when a bird alights nearby.
These plant-voiced compositions are interwoven with field recordings of Country - bird calls, wind through she-oaks, insect murmur, and resonant human vocalisations, creating a sonic tapestry in dialogue with place. For the installation, these soundbeds merge with live transmissions from plants within the gallery, their tones tuned to 432Hz, the natural resonance frequency of the Earth. The plants, attuned to the presence of their kin and the bodies moving among them, respond in subtle shifts of rhythm and tone.
The Grassening is not just about listening, but about relational presence - unfolding dialogue between plant, human, and Country, where every visitor’s movement and breath folds into the living score.
Words: Nicole Smede
THE GRASSENING TEAM
Kath Gadd
Co-lead plant curation and installation
Kath moved to Wollongong in 2006 because she fell in love with a block of land full of local Eucalyptus species.
She didn’t know it at the time but it would have been remnant Grassy Woodland .
For a long time now Kath has been involved in trying to spark a love and appreciation of the natural world in others, both in her work as a Landscape Designer and in her art practice.
The Grassening project has been a process of working with like minded souls to promote the very special Illawarra bushland which surrounds us.
Nicole Smede
Sound Design and Production
Nicole is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, video, music composition, traditional language and poetry. She is Artistic Director - First Nations at Red Room poetry. Nicole is a serial collborator and community arts and education worker, lover etc. Worimi Woman. Member of Koori women's choir - Mudjingaal Yangamba
Eliza Maartensz
Catalogue/zine and map maker, installation assistant
Eliza is a non-indigenous woman whose ancestors travelled to the unceded lands of Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, and Sri Lanka. Eliza grew up on Worimi Country and now lives with her young family on Dharawal Country. She is an architectural graduate with over two decades of experience in the profession of architecture. Throughout her studies she has focused on how spatial designers can re-clarify the narrative of the built environment to care for Country.
Emma Rooksby
Co-lead plants curation, growing and installation
Emma is an environmental educator and co-founder of Growing Illawarra Natives
Penny Sadubin
Wall art (handmade weed charcoal) and installation assistant
Penny is artist educator working at Bundanon, community artist, previously a garden designer and landscape enthusiast.
Katrin Plogstert
Installation assistant
Katrin designs ecologically sensitive landscapes across scales and types, centering local native plants to support people and critters. Originally from Germany, Katrin came to Australia to work in National Parks. She is a gardener and landscape architect.
Kathryn Morgan
Project Lead
Kathryn is a teacher, horticulturist, and landscape architect. She is undertaking a Master’s in Landscape Architecture at UTS, and is interested in critical pedagogy, community-driven spatial design, social and multispecies justice, collaborative writing and art-making.
Photo: Katelyn Slyer
Alex Pike
Image and video projections
Award winning photographer, videographer and writer with a background in Journalism & Biology and a thirst for telling ecological stories. Alex's work has been published in various print and online publications throughout Australia and internationally.
Brooke Dwyer
Seed collection and plant supply
Brooke Dwyer and her practice, Littoral.eco restores and protects native ecosystems and biodiversity across the Illawarra, South Coast, and Sydney Basin—one seed at a time. She collects responsibly sourced native seed collected in line with best-practice guidelines and grow native tubestock, support Threatened Ecological Communities, and shares knowledge through education and skill-building. With deep respect for Country, Brooke works with the land to create lasting, regenerative change.
We acknowledge the Wadi Wadi, Eloura, Dharawal and Yuin Traditional Owners of Dharawal-speaking Country, unceded lands of the Illawarra where we live.
We thank First Nations people for their ongoing work in protecting, holding and sharing knowledge that underpins best practice in landscape design and management all over the world.
This land always was and always will be Aboriginal Land.