Words By Maura Mancini

Just south of Port Douglas, where the rainforest leans towards the sea tide, sits Oak Beach, a quiet stretch of coastline that shapes the life and creative pulse of artist Rosey Cummings.

She collects sun-bleached rope, discarded fishing line, fragments of plastic and other washed-up debris, giving them a second life while telling the urgent story of our threatened coastline.

Her home studio, tucked behind a flourishing garden of natives, ferns and winding vines, feels like an extension of the landscape itself, a place alive with birds, butterflies and other creatures drawn to the plants she grows.

Standing there, Rosie says something that stays with me: “This landscape guides everything I make.”

Her practice is anchored, quite literally, in the land and sea around her. She works with weaving and environmental sculpture, but the materials she uses are far from traditional.

Most are natural, found or recycled, gathered during near-daily walks with a bucket along Oak Beach or collected during beach clean-ups with her sister and the Tangaroa Blue Foundation across Far North Queensland.

Other pieces come from like-minded environmental caretakers who, like Rosey, refuse to let coastal debris vanish unnoticed.

Weathered ropes, tangled fishing line, broken plastic pieces, oxidised wire and palm inflorescences are reimagined as vessels, sculptural forms or coiled “sand bowls”, each echoing the story of the shoreline where they were found.

Sun Vessel; Beach Rope, rusted fencing wire, Coiled and Stitched.

Art as Environmental Witness

Before settling permanently in Far North Queensland, Rosey worked in Melbourne’s public health system as a nurse in sexual health. After moving north, she continued in the same field, often travelling to remote communities to support local health facilities.

Though she doesn’t explicitly connect this work to her art, moving through different landscapes and communities shaped her sense of place and sharpened her awareness of how deeply people rely on and connect with healthy environments.

Life in the tropics offered a different rhythm, and a deeper appreciation for the fragility of coastal ecosystems.

The debris she gathers now lives on in her sculptural works, not as trash transformed into beauty, but as witnesses to the pressures on our marine world.

“As I work,” Rosie says, “I reflect on the structures, forms and colours of the materials and where they’re collected. What are they telling me? How much do I deconstruct them? How do I see them differently?”

Her practice is both a conversation and a confrontation: delight in the colours and textures shaped by the sea, and sadness that they exist at all.

A Garden that Teaches, a Coastline that Needs Healing

Rosie’s home garden is as much a part of her creative life as her studio, a wild, vibrant space filled with native plants, many chosen specifically to attract the local birds, butterflies and other pollinators. Her passion for indigenous and native vegetation has deepened while volunteering at the local council nursery.

Her environmental care extends naturally to the coastline. Coastal clearing, often for ocean-view developments, removes native vegetation that anchors dunes, leaving the shoreline exposed to erosion.

Around her home, Rosey quietly replants where she can, favouring casuarinas and other stabilisers that once held the sand in place.

“It breaks my heart,” she says, “watching trees and other coastal vegetation vanish that used to hold this beach in place.”

Her art, garden and activism are woven from the same fibres: grounded in respect for the land and shaped by a desire to help restore it.

Coastal Requiem; Vine wreaths, spider lily string, seeds

Technique, Tradition and the Stories Materials Tell

Rosey's weaving journey began years ago, when Margie and Yvette, two women living at Cooya, invited her to sit with them weekly, weaving with natural fibres and sharing knowledge.

She honours those teachings, and those of First Nations weavers whose workshops she has attended, while emphasising that her work comes from respect and inspiration rather than cultural appropriation.

She recalls something a First Nations weaver once told her during a weaving session, that she felt the maternal presence of her grandmother in her hands as she wove, a moment that continues to resonate.

Inside her studio, she shows me an enormous handcrafted wooden weaving frame, made for her in her early twenties by a dear friend and master woodworker, Neville Sellick, a highly regarded Victorian artisan who has since passed.

It spent years stored in her parents’ shed until she became determined to bring it north, an almost impossible feat, eventually achieved through determination, excess baggage, and the help of an extraordinary woman who carried it on a plane.

In one of the studio rooms, piles of rope are sorted into strands waiting to become bowls, vessels or other densely woven and stitched forms reminiscent of coral, sea creatures, and the tangled patterns of nature, including delicate jellyfish-like shapes made from natural looking plastic mooring rope.

Her technique is slow, intentional and physically demanding. For works made from Alexander palm inflorescences, she soaks the pieces several times before weaving.

For others, she must strip and tease rope apart and stitch using the rope strands themselves, a process requiring many hours a day over several days and often harsh on the hands.

“It’s rare to find rope strong enough to stitch with,” she explains. “It’s a love-hate relationship. The colours are beautiful, but I wish they weren’t here at all.”

Functional, Conceptual, and Always Site-Specific

Some works are functional, pieces she has rescued and given a second life, like the sun-lounges she restrung with beach rope.

“A bit prickly,” she laughs, “but fine with a towel, and they taught me about warp and weft. Tension is everything.”

Others are conceptual. Ocean Vessel, crafted from found wire, old fishing line, a wooden reel and discarded crab pots, speaks to the consequences of fishing-industry debris.

No Boundaries, a collaboration using rope collected in the Outer Hebrides by a local marine biologist friend, underscores that ocean pollution knows no borders; debris travels on currents from the USA, South East Asia, the Pacific and beyond.

A series of Anemones reveals how plastic mimics life on the sea floor, entangling creatures that mistake it for habitat or food.

Rosey occasionally accepts commissions, but the materials she finds dictate what’s possible. The ocean, not the client, often decides the direction of the work.

A Practice of Care

Walking through Rosey’s studio feels like stepping into a dialogue between nature and human impact, between decay and regeneration.

Each artwork is a record of place: Oak Beach, the Coral Sea, the forest-edged dunes that surround her home.

In a world where marine debris threatens ecosystems from the Great Barrier Reef to the North Atlantic, Rosey’s work serves as both art and activism, a reminder that beauty and responsibility can be woven together, and that every shoreline carries stories worth preserving.

Rosey is a member of the Port Douglas Artists Collective, and her work has appeared in

exhibitions across the region, including galleries in Cairns, Call of the Running Tide; Go Troppo and Escape Artists in Port Douglas and at the Tablelands Regional Gallery.

In 2026, visitors and art lovers can follow her practice on Instagram @rosey.cummings or contact the Port Douglas Artist Inc. to arrange your very own studio visit at Oak Beach.  

Enjoy!

To learn more about Port Douglas Artists Inc. click here.