Ghost

Timber

Approx 3m x 1.5m x 1.5m

Articulate Project Space, Leichhardt, 2023

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Ghost is the culmination of several threads of influence. I grew up enthralled by science fiction films that used computerised topographic terrain mapping to visualise the surface of strange new worlds. As I developed an interest in art, I became fascinated in how such techniques can on the one hand so effectively represent three-dimensional topography on a two-dimensional surface, and yet through this very process lose all connectedness, intimacy and engagement. It seems to me that these losses are only amplified by the fact that this work is a three-dimensional construction of a two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional space.

 

Later in life I started to love photographing the Australian landscape, and remain interested in the different ways that landscape has been represented over time. Europeans considered Australia terra nullius when they arrived, and power was accumulated by those who subsequently explored, mapped, claimed, politically organised, consumed, and ultimately transformed the landscape. Ghost is as much about the empty space 'contained' below as it is about the topographical surface, and also explores themes of integration, colonization and disempowerment.