By Kathryn Morgan, in collaboration with Nicole Smede

Once cleared now returning
the grassy woodland gathers

in quiet uprise
a pulse within soil

beneath concrete
breath returns

An immersive multi-artform installation on Dharawal Wodi Wodi Country is bringing attention to a critically endangered local community – the Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland.

This September, the gallery at The Servo in Port Kembla will become a living grassland, a place where plants hum, leaves cast shadows like moving water, and stories take root in the air. The Grassening, a multi-artform installation for the Illawarra Nature Festival, invites you to listen, watch and feel as an ecosystem comes alive around you.

A collaboration by multiple artists, each bringing their own distinct process, the work layers living sound, image and drawing into a plantscape. Warrimay multidisciplinary artist Nicole Smede captures the electrical signals of native trees, shrubs and grasses to create a live shifting soundscape. Through the foliage, video and photography by Alex Pike flicker and flow across walls. Penny Sadubin’s sweeping charcoal wall drawings ground the space in deep, textural lines. Together, these elements form a thickened, thrumming evocation of the grassland – a biome profoundly altered by over two centuries of human impact. Entering, you’ll be surrounded by the silhouettes, voices, and stories of plants – teeming, magnified, and alive around you.

“The Grassening invites audiences into the living, breathing presence of an Illawarra grassy woodland, through sound, large-scale wall drawings, and multimedia, all woven to create an immersive experience," Nicole says.

"At its heart is an intimate collaboration with the plants themselves – listening to their quiet electrical signals and turning them into immersive soundscapes using a device that reads the tiny electrical fluctuations in a leaf and/or stem. These signals shift with the plant’s experience — light, temperature, water, and its relationships with the world around it.”

Nicole transforms these signals into musical notes, creating the unique “song” of each plant: “A eucalypt in dappled sun will sound different to one after rain. A tuft of native grass will sing in its own unique way when a bird lands nearby."

Recent research shows plants have more than 15 senses, constantly reading and responding to their surroundings. In The Grassening, those responses become music that changes in real time. Nicole weaves these plant-voices with field recordings from Country – bird calls, wind, insect hums, and resonant human vocals – to create a sound tapestry in dialogue with place. Inside the gallery, live plant transmissions join the mix, tuned to 432Hz, the natural frequency of the Earth. The plants respond to each other, and to people moving among them, shifting their rhythms and tones as the space changes.

“For me, The Grassening is about more than listening. It’s about relationship — a living conversation between plant, human, and Country, where every step, breath, and moment you spend here becomes part of the score."

Enjoy spring's Illawarra Nature Festival

The Illawarra Nature Festival takes over the NASA Gallery at Port Kembla venue The Servo on Friday, September 12 and Saturday 13th with activities, film, art and music celebrating our local native plants and animals. You can encounter The Grassening as part of this free celebration of National Biodiversity Month.

Friday night opens at 5pm with food from Balinese Spice Magic, a ‘Wildlife Detectives’ science panel, a smoking ceremony, and a screening of The Message of the Lyrebird, followed by live music inside The Grassening installation.

On Saturday from 1-6pm, the festival transforms into a family-friendly day of hands-on workshops, talks, and activities — from nature journalling and interspecies storytelling to seed-bomb making and learning about native bees.

Why The Grassening 

The Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland is critically endangered. Every microbe, grass tuft, and insect is part of a symbiosis of geology, climate, and life. For the last 209 years — since Charles Throsby brought cattle onto Dharawal Country and began the violent dispossession of Aboriginal lands — the grassland has resisted erasure. Colonisation has not only fragmented the grassland; it has waged war on the knowledge that sustained it. The intricate, careful land management practices developed over millennia were interrupted by genocide. Today, less than 0.5% of the Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland remains. Each remnant patch is a living archive of adaptation, relationship and Country. 

The Grassening is a project I've been developing with Nicole, Penny, Alex Pike, Kath Gadd, Eliza Maartensz, Katrin Plogstert, Brooke Dwyer, and Emma Rooksby. The work is a meditation on the beauty and memory of the grassy woodland. This work invites deep listening, drawn out by Nicole’s sound work, Penny’s drawings, and Alex’s imagery.

We are celebrating swelling interest in restoring the Grassy Woodland.

Penny says: “Our remnant ecological landscapes are treasures, but are often not well known by the general population. The Grassening will introduce the Illawarra Lowland Grassy Woodland to all – in a very special way. This collection of plants and animals is unique to our local area and we can do a lot to ensure its survival into the future, but only if we know what we are looking out for.”

We hope you will take the sound and sensations with you when you leave — helping this critically endangered grassland community grow, link up, and flourish once again across Dharawal Country. 

The Illawarra Nature Festival is a community-led event supported by the Illawarra Ecosystem and Threatened Species Team, Department of Climate Change Energy, the Environment and Water. See the full program and get your free tickets to here.

More on the Grassening here.

Program for Illawarra Nature Festival 2025 @ The Servo Port Kembla

Fri 12 Sept 5pm - 10pm 

Food available from Balinese Spice Magic, drinks from The Servo. Designed for adults, supervised children welcome. 

Sat 13 Sept 1pm - 6pm 

Designed for all ages, family-friendly activities.