The Daughter – Tessa Moncrieff

A Dad & Daughter in Denmark

For this month’s Artist of the Month – we visited two artists in the Great Southern, Paul Moncreiff and Tessa Moncrieff. An artistic Dad and Daughter duo.

This article is written by Sophie Mathewson and is Part 2 of the series.

Part 2: The Daughter

If you ever find yourself in WA’s Great Southern, more specifically in Denmark, you might see a Facebook group called ‘Is the channel blue?’ It’s been created by locals because the question gets bandied around so much about the colour of the Wilson inlet.

When the water is blue, it’s this vivid, clear, river-meets-sea turquoise, beyond any postcard approximation. And when the Facebook group lights up with a “yes,” people drop everything. They flock down to swim in it, to swing from rope swings over it, and if they’re lucky, to witness phosphorescence lighting the water from within.

Tessa Moncrieff doesn’t need the Facebook group. She lives right across from the inlet. And every morning at 6am, while most of Denmark sleeps, she’s already out there with her red cloud kelpie Elkie, walking the same loop. Over the bridge, down to where she takes off her shoes and her feet meet sand, following the track where river becomes sea.

Tessa the Artist

Every now and then you encounter someone who radiates happiness. So curious and engaged and fascinated with the world around them that they brim with life. Tessa is one of those people. She’s a critical thinker who likes deep conversations, but she’s also pure pluck and rebellion, and is hysterically funny and light-hearted.

Her studio will tell you everything you need to know. It sits between her husband Andy’s woodworking space and the kids’ elaborate chalk-drawings on the concrete. Andy’s side is filled with timber and tools, while Tessa’s holds printmaking equipment and fabrics, art books stacked everywhere, an old stop-motion animation model gathering dust, and silk screens leaning against walls. The family’s creative domains feel deliberately and joyfully intertwined.

Tessa is an artist. She’s also a steady surfer, a mother of two – Archie and Lotta – and someone currently deep into studying astrology. Not the magazine horoscope variety she’s quick to inform, but the ancient mathematics of it: the precession of the equinoxes, and the slow turn of cosmic ages. She’s doing a twelve-month course through the Sydney School of Astrology with Mark Lawrence, who works with some of the world’s leading astrologers. And it’s this research of tracking planetary cycles, and understanding the importance of timing and dates, that has shaped her latest artistic endeavour.

Tessa has been walking the same stretch of inlet each day, timing her visits to different phases of the moon, documenting what she finds with a camera and sketchbook. It’s quiet and accumulating work. The same path, walked repeatedly, and the same landscape, observed in its perpetual transformation. What is emerging is a record of attention and proof that if you show up to the same place enough times, it reveals itself as never the same place at all.

“The walks began as intellectual curiosity,” she says, “As well as a determined desire to get out in nature on my own more regularly. And I really am noticing more, and finding changes as I walk the inlet.”

At the moment, she’s calling the exhibition “Prawn Rock” – and yes, there may be a painted prawn involved, though she’s keeping her cards close to her chest (no firm commitment on a creative crustacean).

In her studio, early works are emerging.. drawings like visual diary entries, polaroid- photograph cutouts that show snapshots of change. She plans to print batik designs onto fabric, and stretch them over her dad’s old wooden frames. “Batik printing is one-off and organic, like nature itself,” she explains of the process she learned in South East Asia. “It’s not going to look the same on each print, it always produces something different.”

An Evolution of Work

To understand what Tessa’s doing now, you need to know where she’s been.

Her childhood was steeped in making things. Both parents worked in arts education, and her dad was a successful practising artist. She grew up around silkscreens and canvases, baskets of fabric, and drawers full of pencils and paints in a household where creativity was just expected. She was a child actor appearing on TV shows and in a feature film alongside the formidable Kerry Armstrong. After an art scholarship in high school, she studied textiles and fashion, then ran a label called Plonk that sold in Melbourne boutiques through the 2010s.

Her previous work celebrated nostalgia and handmade processes in an age of mass production. But this new body of work is a little more contemplative and is grounded in slowing down and paying attention to the present rather than celebrating the past. It’s still handmade, still preserving old techniques like batik printing, and still upcycling materials like her father’s old wooden frames. But the subject has moved from memory to metamorphosis.

Of the astrological connection, Tessa is acutely, almost comically aware of the optics of her research: female artist, coastal town, lunar observations. She knows it’s a short leap to crystals and sage bundles, so she is clear that the moon and planetary shifts are just the starting point to explore the themes of daily observation and change. “The moon’s phases are an entry point rather than the focus. They’re a way of structuring my attention across months of walking and watching.”

What’s emerging in this new work it seems, is less a departure from her previous work than its logical evolution. The aesthetics of handmade processes, organic unpredictability, and the resistance to mass production remains, but this work is about presence rather than preservation, and about what reveals itself through sustained, disciplined return.

So… Is the channel blue?

So back to the Facebook group “Is the channel blue?” Well, this year it’s been lighting up more than usual. The channel has stayed impossibly, brilliantly blue for months on end. Ordinarily, the channel closes every January or February, the sea cutting it off in a predictable seasonal turn. Then come the winter rains, the road floods, and the entire community materialises with tractors to ceremonially reopen it. It’s become something of an informal party; families gathering to witness the return of massive rapids.

But this year.. it stayed closed till mid Autumn, allowing Tessa to keep walking, watching and documenting something that would normally have stopped months ago.

“It’s a pretty interesting year for me to be documenting the channel” she says in what can only be interpreted as an understatement. Because while she’s tracking the quotidian shifts, how light refracts differently at dawn, how vegetation responds to tidal pull, the moon’s position altering the entire character of place, she’s also bearing witness to a rare year when the pattern changed. When nature, in its own mischievous wisdom, decided to rewrite the script.

Back in her studio, amid the beautiful pandemonium of family life, Tessa shows me what all this walking has yielded. Photographs cut into shapes that echo the inlet’s curves. Sketches like a visual diary, and blocks of wood waiting for paint. The kids career past, trailing laughter. Music drifts over from Andy’s workshop. This is where art happens: right in the thick of life, with all its glorious, unruly chaos.

And each morning, before any of that chaos begins, she’s out there. Shoes off, feet on earth, sometimes checking the swell report first, sometimes just standing still to watch the light change. Elkie bounds ahead. The channel does whatever the channel does. And Tessa pays attention, translating what she sees into something both rigorous and beautiful, proving that the most radical act might just be showing up, again and again, to the same patch of earth until it reveals itself as infinite.