Rewild your mind and reconnect with nature to rediscover clarity, creativity, and calm.
In an age of busy schedules, constant screen time, and digital overload, artist-led nature tours offer a much-needed reset.
These guided experiences bring art and nature together, inviting people to slow down, look closely, and reconnect with the living world through creativity.
An artist-led nature tour isn’t a typical sightseeing trip — it’s a moving, sensory workshop with the landscape. As you travel through wild places, an artist acts as your guide, sharing creative tools and prompts to help you engage more deeply with your surroundings. You might sketch the reflections on the river, write in response to the wind, weave something from reeds, or simply learn how to see and listen more deeply.
Up The Creek provides restorative journeys with artists along some of Victoria’s favourite waterways, combining guided paddling with creative practice. Our paddling art journeys turn time on the river into a regenerative experience — part adventure, part ecological encounter. Each journey improves personal wellbeing, fosters team connection, and helps participants build a sense of care for the river itself.
Every Up The Creek journey is designed in collaboration with its environment — its stories, ecologies, and rhythms — encouraging participants to reflect on how these uncontrollable forces shape, challenge and restore. What happens on the water often ripples into life back home: a renewed sense of presence, balance, and responsibility towards the places we live and work.
An artist-in-residence tour is a hosted adventure where our guides hold space for connection to self, other and the environment. On Up The Creek’s paddling art journeys, that landscape is often the living waters of Birrarung/Yarra or Dhungala/Murray, where the river itself becomes both our studio and collaborator.
Rather than just another sightseeing tour, you’ll embark on a journey dictated by the rhythm with the river, invited to sketch, write, photograph, weave or simply pay attention in new ways to sights, sounds and the water's gentle movement. This creative practice helps to deepen our connection to the river, slowing us down and helping us see the details we would otherwise overlook.
Artist-led tours sit within a broader movement of regenerative nature experiences that reinterpret tourism as something low impact and restorative to both participants and our environment.
For Up The Creek, this means designing journeys that honour local ecologies and cultures, draw on emerging best practices in regenerative tourism, and treat each river stretch as a single living entity rather than a backdrop.
Travel centres on connection rather than consumption; we reconnect with the natural world, explore our relationship with uncertainty and restore the river where we can.
Art in nature does something that information alone cannot.
Research shows that nature-based art activities can support mental health, reduce stress, and build emotional regulation, especially for young people and communities under pressure.
When creativity and river time are woven together, people often report feeling calmer and more grounded. The pause offered by slow creative practice in nature gives them the space to reflect and make sense of their lives and surroundings.
Dedicated arts-in-nature programs generate wellbeing benefits that go beyond a standard holiday tour, fostering stronger social connection, a sense of belonging and responsibility, and a clearer awareness of environmental issues.
Up The Creek’s artist-led nature tours are guided by the river’s own pace, inviting people to slow down, listen, and respond with curiosity rather than urgency. As we take the time to be present in the landscape, free of tech distraction and day-to-day stress, a paddle becomes less about the physical distance covered and more about how deeply participants can be present to journey into the colours, textures, sounds and stories of the river.
Combining paddling with creativity turns the river into both your journey and teacher.
Up The Creek’s paddling art journeys on Dhungala, for example, invite small groups to travel together by canoe over several days, accompanied by an artist-in-residence.
Days are shaped by the rhythm of the water, early light on the river, time to make, talk, or sit quietly on sandbanks, and evenings reflecting under big skies.
This kind of guided public nature trip is physically undemanding and highly supportive, making it accessible to people without prior paddling or art experience. Qualified Up The Creek river guides handle safety and logistics, while the artist offers prompts, practices, and perspectives that help participants see the landscape with new eyes.
Up The Creek’s river journeys are co-led by experienced river guides and practising artists whose work is deeply informed by landscape. Many of these artists have long-standing relationships with the rivers they work on. They bring a sensitivity to both environmental and social dynamics on the water, echoing what leading arts-in-nature and outdoor education programs describe as “place‑responsive paedagogy”.
Alongside artistic expertise, our guides understand that every public nature tour is an opportunity for regeneration, reflecting principles championed by global initiatives such as Business for Nature. This might look like small acts of care like cleaning up a site, noticing erosion, paying attention to river health, or holding reflective conversations about how participants want to live differently when they return home.
In this way, artist-led journeys become a gentle training ground for more ethical, embodied responses to the environmental challenges of our time.
Victoria is rich with waterways that lend themselves to art in nature tours. Along Birrarung/Yarra, participants can experience the river’s journey from forested upper reaches to its urban stretches through Narrm/Melbourne.
Canoe tours co-designed by Up The Creek and cultural partners, such as the NGV’s “Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070” program, invite people to rethink the river as more than just a line on a map.
Further north, the Dhungala/Murray offers long, meandering stretches ideal for multi-day regenerative paddling journeys. Ancient river red gums, expansive skies, and quiet backwaters provide an ever-changing canvas for drawing, photography, and reflection. These routes emphasise low-impact travel, collaboration with local communities, and a deep respect for the river’s cultural significance.
Artist-led nature tours create very tangible benefits for schools, organisations, and communities.
For schools, time on the river supports student wellbeing, focus, and emotional regulation, leading to an increase in confidence and autonomy. Our journeys also address curriculum priorities around sustainability, leadership, and place-based learning, reflecting evidence that nature-based learning boosts wellbeing, engagement, and connection to nature in school settings.
For corporates, paddling art journeys offer a calm, low-tech space for teams to rebuild trust, listen differently, and meet CSR and ESG goals. Our experiences facilitate active care and regeneration, rather than simply offsetting impact. They align with research showing that nature-based team-building improves communication, trust, and collaboration, leading to increased productivity and performance.
For community groups, our journeys open accessible pathways into local waterways, building social connection, pride in place, and a shared sense of responsibility for the health of the river. This mirrors findings that place attachment strengthens wellbeing and motivates pro-environmental behaviour at community scale.
Artist-led nature tours don’t just feel good; they also make economic sense by supporting healthier, more focused students, more collaborative and productive teams, and stronger, more engaged communities who are motivated to care for the places they live and work in.
For those curious about the transformative and economic benefits of our waterway adventures, Up The Creek offers a growing calendar of artist-led nature tours and regenerative journeys for the public, schools, and organisations.
To explore upcoming paddling art journeys and other regenerative nature experiences, visit Up The Creek’s artist-led nature tours and broader regenerative nature experiences pages.
Whether for creative renewal, community connection, or a different way of travelling lightly through the world, these tours offer an invitation: come learn with the river, and let art be the language of that conversation.