Detail of:
Lance and I would walk along the dune. He suggested not to visit in summer when the tempertaure reaches fifty-degrees. I took the negative out of my pocket and let the sun burn it into the paper.
Unfixed lumen print on resin paper, 6x6 cm.
The time it takes to cast a shadow, PhD exibition, Sight Eight Gallery Melbourne, February 2025.
the time it takes to cast a shadow
2025
The time it takes to cast a shadow is an ongoing body of work created on and surrounding the landscape of Lake Mungo, on the traditional lands of the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngyiampaa and Barkindji communities. The work consists of a series of lumen prints that record my return to and engagement
with past photographic negatives in the landscape. By developing these
negatives on site, the series reflects
an evolving relationship with this landscape. This process is further guided by my approach to visualising my own
unfixed, unsettled and shifting understandings of Lake Mungo over time.
This process of
“unsettling” settler-colonial visual discourses remains incomplete and necessarily
provisional. However, I hope it offers a generative space for re-imagining landscape
practices that are more attuned to histories of dispossession and, crucially, to the
ongoing presence and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
In other words, I hope my work represents a modest contribution toward fostering a
more critical and ethical engagement with landscape—one that acknowledges its
layered histories, resists colonial erasures, and envisions alternative possibilities for
settler-colonial relationships to and photographic representations of Australian
landscapes.
Installation view Encounters in a Dark Room, First Site Gallery for Photo2022 Festival, Melbourne. Image credit: Keelan O’Hehir.
Encounters in a Dark Room
2023
Archival inkjet prints, plywood board, Vantablack paint, dimensions variable.
Dark Room Encounters was a collaborative installation with Kieran Begely (NZ) and Lesley Turnbull (SCT) that was shown as part of Photo22 International Photography Exhibition held in Melbourne at First Site Gallery.
Exhibited as part of Photo2022 Festival, Melbourne. Supported by the City of Melbourne Creative Grants.
Black Holes
2020-21
Drawing from North American writer and photography theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of the ‘colonial gaze,’ Black Holes is a series of works exploring the settler-colonial gaze as a pervasive
framework that has shaped the Australian landscape as a blank space
or a site of absence—an imagined void to be filled with settler-colonial narratives and
possession.
This work explores how the mechanisms of the settler-colonial gaze could be registered and made visible within
my photographs. Central to this exploration was the development of a “black hole” motif
which serves as both a visual and metaphorical device, visualising the voids and blind
spots created within settler-colonial landscape narratives.
Exhibitions:
Aesthetica Art Prize (Finalist), York Gallery of Art, UK
Critical Limit, Richmond Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne
Our Land, Our Lens
2022-ongoing
Our Land, Our Lens is an arts-education program in collaboration with
Larrakia curator and photographer Nina Fitzgerald in 2022. This program facilitates
film photography workshops for young people in remote communities across the
Northern Territory. By fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous perspectives
through photographic practices, this initiative builds on the decolonisation of
photography, encouraging more inclusive and culturally reflective ways of engaging
with image-making.
The workshops are supported local governments and charities including The Smith Family.
