Floodworks: Anna Kiparis and the Memory of Water

FLOODS do not simply vanish when the waterline retreats. They leave stains on fences, silt pressed into the grain of timber, debris caught in powerlines. They lodge themselves in memory — in the hesitation with which neighbours retell the story, or in the silence that accompanies photographs of ruined rooms. In Melbourne’s Maribyrnong, the flood of October 2022 has already entered this layered terrain of memory. For many, it remains a wound not yet fully healed.

It is into this aftermath that artist Anna Kiparis steps with Floodworks, an exhibition that turns away from spectacle and towards the quiet, persistent work of resilience. Presented at the Maribyrnong Library from 2 to 23 October 2025, the series revisits streets and houses once submerged, not to record their damage alone but to honour the endurance that followed.

Kiparis has long worked with analogue film, drawn to its capacity for fragility and imperfection. In Floodworks, she embraces this vulnerability. The black-and-white images are scarred by deliberate interference in the film’s development — scratches, abrasions, marks that echo the river’s own. One photograph, Bank and River 2025, shows a tree trunk thrusting into the water’s edge. Its surface, etched and weathered, mirrors the photographic print itself: a reminder that both landscape and image bear the marks of time and trauma.

This choice of medium matters. In an age of instant digital documentation, where floods are captured by smartphones and broadcast globally within minutes, Kiparis turns deliberately to a slower, more contemplative process. Film requires waiting. It resists the instantaneity of catastrophe and insists on duration, on reflection. In her hands, the photograph becomes not a transparent window but a textured scar — fragile, partial, but insistently present.

Aftermath and Return

The exhibition also presents the paired works Aftermath, Maribyrnong 2022 and Aftermath, Maribyrnong Revisited 2025. Together they form the heart of the project, a diptych that compresses three years into two images.

The first was made late at night on 16 October 2022, just two days after the floodwaters peaked at 4.22 metres. Under the glare of a streetlight, piles of ruined furniture and appliances are heaped at the roadside. Sofas, mattresses, tables, refrigerators — the domestic life of a suburb now transformed into waste. The image, later shortlisted for the 2023 Footscray Art Prize, carries a stark documentary force. It was not conceived as art, Kiparis recalls, but as an act of registering what could not yet be spoken.

Three years later she returned to the same site. The resulting photograph, Aftermath, Maribyrnong Revisited 2025, shows the same houses in daylight. The debris is gone; fences have been rebuilt; the street is orderly once more. Overhead, the same network of powerlines cuts through the sky, binding past and present in a fragile continuity.

Placed side by side, the two images refuse both sentimentality and erasure. They do not deny the trauma of 2022, nor do they claim redemption. Instead, they reveal resilience as a form of labour — the accumulation of thousands of hours of community action, neighbours sharing tools, families choosing to remain. In their juxtaposition lies the truth of recovery: it is never complete, never heroic, but always ongoing.

Kiparis is not interested in spectacle. Her photographs refuse both the drama of disaster and the sentimentality of redemption. What she shows instead is the persistence of people who continue, altered but still present.

Photography as Care

What distinguishes Kiparis’s practice is her ability to move between registers. On one hand, the scarred black-and-white film images in Floodworks work as metaphors: photographs that carry the flood’s residue in their very fibres, images transformed by intentional damage that mirrors the fragility of memory. On the other, the Aftermath works are direct, in colour, and documentary: raw testimony of disruption and recovery.

This oscillation allows her to hold both poetics and evidence together. The viewer encounters not just what happened, but how it continues to reverberate. The scarred analogue prints remind us that memory itself is unstable, marked by interference. The colour diptych of 2022 and 2025 grounds that instability in lived fact. Together they form a body of work that is both historical record and emotional testimony.

Born in Melbourne to parents who migrated from northern Greece, Kiparis completed a Masters in Photography at RMIT University, beginning her practice in documentary analogue traditions before extending into digital explorations of suburban surrealism. Her work has been recognised nationally, shortlisted for the National Photographic Portrait Prize, Footscray Art Prize, Banyule Works on Paper, Darebin Art Prize, Noel Counihan Commemorative Art Award, Wyndham Art Prize, and the Emerging Artist Award (fortyfivedownstairs). Her photographs are represented in the permanent collections of the Maribyrnong City Council and the Merri-bek City Council, as well as in private collections.

Kiparis previously spoke with M-ARTLENS about her exhibition Strange Air, which reflected on Melbourne’s suburban landscapes in the aftermath of the 2020–21 pandemic lockdowns. [Read the full feature interview here].

At its core, Floodworks asks what photography can do after disaster. Kiparis suggests that its role is not only to record but to care. Her images hold space for memory without freezing it, honour scars without erasing them, and acknowledge resilience without romanticising it.

The Maribyrnong flood was a local event, but in Kiparis’s photographs it becomes part of a larger conversation about how communities confront environmental upheaval. Her work insists that floods are never only about water. They are about what remains afterwards: scars, stories, and the quiet persistence of people who continue, altered but still standing.

Exhibition details

Floodworks
Artist: Anna Kiparis

Venue: Maribyrnong Library, 200 Rosamond Rd, Maribyrnong
Dates: 2 – 23 October 2025
Exhibition Launch: Thursday 2 October, 6–7:30 pm