As an open-access festival, Nature Festival 2024 will bloom across South Australia’s many landscapes, from Adelaide’s alleys to the ochre outback, dramatic coastlines, and world-class wine regions. With festive gatherings and intimate experiences, the festival offers an escape from screens and the ordinary distractions of everyday life, reconnecting everyone with what is real.
Art enthusiasts will find an abundance of offerings to engage with at this year’s Nature Festival, led by Pleasance at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). Offering an immersive architectural folly inspired by the tranquil flow of the nearby Karrawirra Parri/River Torrens, Pleasance is a floral art installation, designed by Jac Semmler from Superbloom & Fallow, inviting visitors to pause and revel in a journey through a rich tactile field of colour, beauty, and awe within the AGSA Courtyard.
Nature Festival 2024 Artist in Residence, Eleanor Noir, based out of Wittunga Botanic Garden, will create a public large-scale, crowd-sourced, drawing installation titled ‘Our Beating Hearts, Their Beating Wings: An Interspecies Murmuration’, focused on bird species loss and community resilience. Alongside the large-scale artwork, Noir will also present a kids drawing workshop that will introduce children to the local birdlife of Wittunga Botanic Garden.
Moving Mountains will be a new large-scale sculptural work by SA artist Hari Koutlakis. Over two weekends in October. Koutlakis will elevate two suburban playgrounds into dynamic sculptural spaces of awe and wonder. Young and old are invited to experience and explore this extraordinary transformation of playgrounds into dynamic spaces and contribute to the pieces or just explore the playgrounds like you have never seen them before.
Food enthusiasts can delight in an exclusive Planet-to-Plate Immersion at Bird in Hand wineries’ private gardens promising a gastronomic journey experience like no other. Participants will enjoy a cooking demonstration and canapés by Chef Jacob Davey, followed by an estate garden tour in the Mediterranean-inspired gardens designed by Susie Nugent.
Sinclair Gully Wines will host a variety of events, including sparkling winemaking, folk and blues music performances, and wildflower walks, offering a unique blend of nature, music, and fine wine.
Insightful talks will inspire attendees, highlighted by AGSA’s 7 X 7 Awe Talks, featuring seven speakers, speaking for seven minutes, with each speaker responding to seven nature-based works within the AGSA collection. For those in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, they can listen to the Social History of the Adnyamathanha People, an event that offers attendees the opportunity to listen to an interpretation of traditional life through the recorded recollections from Elders, hearing how day-to-day life was changed forever.
Further family-friendly activities include Reefs, Marine Life & Kites at Kingston Park Coastal Reserve, allowing families to explore the intertidal reef at Seacliff Beach with a local marine enthusiast and enjoy kite flying. Additionally, festival goers are invited to explore the nocturnal marine garden of the Port River with Port Environment Centre’s event Our Hidden Marine Garden Revealed. SA Government House will open its doors once more, offering families a chance to explore one of Adelaide’s most famous houses and gardens, and for those on the Fleurieu Peninsula, Marine Biologist Ian Milne will lead an intertidal exploration at Yilki Reef.
Step aboard the SA famed Popeye River Cruise and embark on an extraordinary journey with Waterway Tales: The Floating Stage. Offering two distinctive 90-minute experiences, each cruise will blend the tranquility of Adelaide’s waterways with the rich tapestry of storytelling and performance, all the while enjoying delicious food and drink from South Australian providers.
Music and performance events are plenty in the program, including the Evening Chorus with the Bowerbird Collective, celebrating the closing night of Nature Festival on Sunday, 13th of October with a sunset concert at Carrick Hill. Sinclair Gully Wines will host various music performances in a natural setting and Naomi Keyte will perform beautifully crafted folk songs in an intimate setting at Cherry Bomb Cafe in Ashton Hills.
A new music commission from Zhao Liang and San Ureshim reflecting Adelaide’s traditional Japanese garden Himeji, is a beautiful new work that evokes traditional music and contemporary folk, with a touch of Japanese, Middle Eastern and Chinese culture. For something more up-tempo, Adelaide’s Indigenous Mapuché Chilean/Australian Indie artist LENI, will join forces with one of Australia’s most prolific and powerful lyricists, composers and performers in Glenn Skuthorpe, to take audiences on a musical journey in the forests of Sinclair’s Gully.
Nature Festival Chair, Vicki-Jo Russell, remarks, “This year’s theme, ‘Awe’, focuses on moments that captivate us, pulling us out of the rush and disconnection of daily life and into a deeper relationship with nature and the world around us. A relationship that reminds us that we are part of something bigger and magnificent.”
“Now in our 5th year, we have seen so many South Australians re-embrace their relationship with the natural world around them and we are looking to expand on that this year with another stunning program of events.”
