Boynes’ works render the steelworks and its surrounds as fractured, atmospheric visions, where structures and figures hover between endurance and erasure, presence and collapse. The exhibition honours the histories embedded in this landscape and the generations of workers whose lives and labour have defined it. Long central to Australia’s industrial identity, the region emerges here as both a site of making and unmaking, ultimately of prosperity, sacrifice, and lasting consequence.

Continuing Boynes’ sustained engagement with industrial landscapes and the Anthropocene, Rising Tide also marks a deeply personal return to the Illawarra, a region bound to his own history and to the legacy of his late mother, artist Mandy Martin.

Poetic and uncompromising, Rising Tide asks how art can bear witness to transformation—holding space for grief, respect, and beauty, while insisting on responsibility, justice, and the urgency of change.