Artist Interview: Conversation with Jazz Money

River's Flow (In Every Future) is an embroidered textile installation by Jazz Money, a Wiradjuri artist and poet based on Gadigal Country, Sydney. River’s Flow (In Every Future) invokes an embodied engagement with Country and story through a dynamic activation of space.

This email exchange between Jazz Money and Alinta Maguire, MAMA First Nations Curator, occurred in April 2026.

In what ways has Country, or specifically rivers, informed your practice as a poet and artist?

As a Wiradjuri person, our knowings, culture and ways of being are intimately entwined with the river systems of Country. The wisdom of the rivers, who are powerful agents of change, ancient and eternal, continue to teach generosity, reciprocity, respect, persistence and patience. I find myself returning again and again to the teaching of rivers, to inform my art practice but to also guide me in life. I find that rivers have the answers to most questions if you know how to listen.

When engaging with your work, the audience is drawn to read your poem upwards- what does this suggest about the tangible/intangible/metaphysical poetics of rivers, waterways and Country?

I like that the work evokes rivers, but also air currents and the exchange of water cycles. Like any poem, there are a multitude of ways to read, engage and interpret the work. Like a rising mist, the piece lifts through the gallery, inviting the audience to journey up, through, under and over the poem, becoming an active part of the story of this place.

Can you elaborate on how bringing poetry off the page speaks to legacies of First Nations protest and activism?

As First Nations people, we are highly politicised, whether we like it or not. Our place here is eternally entwined with Country, and yet every day all across this land Blakfullas struggle against oppression. For as long as there has been a colonial project on this continent, there has been protest from First Nations people. What a massive poetic legacy, what a complex inheritance, what an honour to be a person of this land and a descendant of our ancestors.

How does restoring a more relational mind/body/place connection contribute to the ongoing process of decolonisation?

In my art making I am interested in how we can honour First Nations oral traditions of story – that are place specific, bodily held and known and transferred – in parallel to a written tradition inherited from colonisation. I think there is a terrible division that was sown centuries ago by a strain of European philosophic inquiry that separates the human mind from the human body. A ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of intellectualism that valorises a certain type of thinking person (white, cis, straight, male, able-bodied, upper class) as more important than anyone who has to live intimately with their physical self (bodies of colour, labouring bodies, birthing bodies, disabled bodies, queer bodies etc).

I think this obsession with the mind that creates a hierarchy over the needs of the body is a tragedy. Because we all live in these bodies, a series of miracles alongside one another, on this living planet that holds us all. We need care, intimacy, connection and community to survive.

All this is a longwinded way of saying, I like to make art that invites the body into the story. Working with poetry in a site specific way that asks the body to participate, to move, to dance, to listen, to smell, to become connected in relational exchange with place.

You spoke of this idea of ‘the same river into eternity’. How does it respond to First Nations cosmological and philosophical understandings, particularly in relation to the nonlinearity of time?

In a deep time understanding of Country, the river always was, always is, and always will be. The colonial interventions that scar the landscape now sit alongside and within an eternal story. The waters of the river constantly move, refresh, change, ebb and flow, yet they follow a current carved millennia ago. Riverbeds that have held the footprints of our ancestors since the first sunrise, that know our stories, our songs, and will hold our descendants until the last sunset. All of this is true, all at once.

This exhibition is part of nginha - here and now, celebrating the commissioning of new art and ideas as a vital part of the Museum’s activities.

All images by Jeremy Weihrauch