Severed Rot

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2017

Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne

11 35mm photographs,

2 lithographs,

5 ink drawings

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'Severed Rot describes the etched barricades that scar this Earth. Clawing into and scraping away from thick caves and serpentine gullies of black crayon grease, expressing the tearing scratch of History in the Land. Scoured, lacerated and divided, Tasmanian Land is scratched. It's surface suggests a layered etch that echoes an ever-present history of western imposition.

 

The Land and its shadows are constant. Trees, rocks, grasses and bracken, human animals, bones and non-human animals work with natural forces of light, wind and gravity to construct and manipulate the presence of shade upon the skin of the Land.

Elements of the natural formation of transient shadow; hierarchies between animate/inanimate, living/non-living and culture/nature are blurred.

 

Regardless of strategic intention, once there, the Landscape instructs: influencing my movements. According to direction of wind, light and rain, waiting for and adjusting to the ferocity of the suns beam and softening, my senses tune to the environment. The slow creep of ephemeral shadows fill the earth’s lungs. Softly inhaling, the shadows reach over hills. Gently exhaling, they retreat.

 

Exploiting the categorical mode of recording specimen used by colonial botanists, zoologists, and archaeologists, I draw the prolapsing sheep and her lamb as monoliths before a white background. This defiant act conveys the spectacle of imported flesh that trespasses native Land. Contrasting photographs fill the picture plane with abstracted Land and fur, bone and flesh. The dog, white figures, and sheep represent species introduced by the colonial project. Interrupting the surface of these photographs are scratched specks of white revealing an ethereal presence of ghosts within land hauntingly denoted Terra Nullius ‘nobody’s land’.'

 

 

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