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.