The Last Forest is a visual account of one, of the many global peripheries where industrial-nature-exploitation takes place. This project explores a range of logging forests in Tasmania and is predominantly centered around the Styx Forest Region.
The Styx is an area with a rich history of logging, and has recently come under new pressures of tourism, green politics and transforming modern ideologies. Like most sites of resource extraction, the Styx Region has been somewhat overlooked and hidden from popular awareness. Tucked behind a thin veneer of old growth forest; environmental legends, and damning. Here, vision is brought to a range of cultural, political, environmental and ætheric behaviours in this space.
(2019-2022).
This project presents a tri-narrative. It entangles the subjective experiences of a photographer attempting to establish an effective visual methodology; the stories of a grandmother to her grandchild about the consciousness of planets; and the photographic documentation of an eclipse and blood moon that took place on the 26th of May, 2021.
Though the entanglement of multiple narratives, new concepts and views are transmuted.
(2021).
On the surface, the Living Land is a visual exploration into the Tasmanian wilderness.
Underneath it seeks to reach toward other areas. Sociologically, it is a call to change unsustainable and exploitative nature practices. It does this by identifying threatened nature spaces and examples of what may be lost. Politically, it is a recognition of nonhumans, and an argument for the intelligence of the natural world. Personally, it is one persons journey into the wilderness, and a record of discovery.
Through the use of the visual method, discourse, and mythology, The Living Land plots one possible path of transformation from humanism to something a little less anthropocentric.
(2014-2020).
She moves, fluid, like waves. One moment crashing against an invisible wall, the next, spectre like, vanishing through it. Her single form vibrates through sheets of light, blending into a multiplicity. Forms emerge in her bodily writing, some like her own form, but so too, do forms manifest unlike her own. As her dance continues, she, the person, vanishes more and more as archetypes of human consciousness emanate from her sacred movements.
This project blends the stillness of the photograph, with the movement of the dancer. By merging the two together a new vision of what dance and photography are arises. Through the qualities of the camera, the energetic movements of the dancer are captured. Action is rendered still, as we witness the almost religious, poly-theistic captures of the embodied writing of dance.
(2018).
Slum Life
exploratory research
I walk into a plastic recycling factory to find several teenage boys working around a custom made plastic chipping machine. They stuff large plastic containers into the sharp teeth of the machine, barely centimeters from their unprotected hands. The room has a heavy fog of plastic chips, and an overwhelming smell of toxin that makes me feel like emptying the contents of my stomach. It’s so dark, my camera struggles to capture the scene. Temperatures are so high many of the boys work in their underclothes only. Their bodies are covered in plastic shards embedded into their naked flesh. I turn to one of the men asking, "How can they work here, I feel so ill already". He responds, "The boys who work in here, don't live very long"...We leave the room.
(This project is exploratory, designed only to scope out the potential for a more comprehensive visual account of slum living).
(2011/2014/forthcoming).
When not using the camera to calm my creative hunger I use other tools of art to make marks in the expression of nature, society and mind.
Lead and paper has been my constant companion on many a walk into nature or exploration of a cultural group. Here, you can find a range of some of those sketches.