"in the small hours of tomorrow" brings together three artefacts shaped through sustained attention to place: an embroidered colour palette drawn from the bark and leaves of silver birch along the Campaspe River, a silver birch collector card, and a small printed phrase- in the small hours of tomorrow.

The work emerges from time spent walking beside the Campaspe River. The river has long shaped this town - first as a vital stop for goldfields travellers in the 1850s, later as a centre of pastoral settlement and bluestone architecture - its flow connecting the Central Highlands to the Murray River, and onward to the artist’s home in South Australia.

The embroidery, made many years ago, translates these encounters into a slow, tactile record of colour, time, and care. In contrast, the silver birch card - which was distributed through tobacco sales between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries - carries the legacy of colonial plant trade, where trees were catalogued, circulated, and reduced to resource, it's inclusion is a gesture to the remembrance of systems that have historically framed land and plants as commodities rather than kin.

The collection acts as a quiet prayer: a hope that in the small hours of tomorrow we might loosen our attachment to the inherited logics of extraction and begin to imagine a more attentive, reciprocal way of living with the more-than-human world.

Amber Cronin is a cross-disciplinary artist living and working on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide, South Australia). Her practice moves between sculpture, textiles, sound, and performance, creating works that gather people, materials, and environments in shared acts of attention and reflection. Situated within an ecology of research that includes plants, soil, and sound, her projects explore resilience, ecological grief, and the ways we remain connected—to one another and to the more-than-human world—during times of transformation.

Developed through extended periods of research and collaboration, Cronin’s work reframes everyday gestures as participatory rituals. Her practice arises from an oscillation between global phenomena and intimate encounters, finding expression in spaces where art becomes both contemplation and survival—a means of staying with the heavy things in order to move forward.

Cronin’s practice operates as an interdependent system of studio making, gallery presentation, facilitation, and community engagement. She has worked, performed, and exhibited across Australia and internationally, presenting work in galleries, festivals, and site-responsive settings. Her approach is rigorous, research-driven, and deeply connective—centering relationships, systems thinking, and ecological entanglement as key strategies for artistic inquiry and cultural resilience.

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