This text explores some political implications and philosophical perspectives of
the creative process and visual elements of this exhibition, Anamorphic Visions.
The term ‘anamorphic’ refers to an image that is distorted, but when viewed
from a particular angle appears normal. In this work, the term operates as a
metaphor for the ways in which white western culture both distorts, renders
normal, and erases the Indigenous histories embedded within the landscape.
This exhibition explores this ‘anamorphic lens’ through an installation that
investigates my personal experiences of the landscape as a white settler through
a political and philosophical lens.
My process of making work usually begins with an intuitive and emotional
interaction with a particular site, captured through video or photography. The
work for this exhibition began when I visited my grandmother’s house, which is
located on Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. I was drawn to filming
this particular landscape because I wanted to capture the physical and
psychological feeling of unease that I personally sensed being there. This could
be connected to my awareness that there are ancient histories, community and
culture connected to this country that I have no knowledge of because of the
actions of my own ancestors.
Within my work, filming has always been a bodily action, and I often move with
my breath and whole body when filming. This process was also a way to work
with this landscape and my response to it. To return to the body as a focus point
of understanding the world is an important reversal, because it centralizes
experiences that are often ignored in dominant philosophical and political
discourses. The original video material was filmed in the reflection of a damn, an
image of the natural within the unnatural, a European construction/obstruction
of the environment. This is one of the ways in which the work attempts to
collapse and blur the destructive binary distinctions so often present within
western culture, between ‘landscape’, and ‘human’, natural and unnatural, still
and moving image.
The distinctive colours of the landscape and reflected sky in the video are
evocative of an ‘Australian’ colonial narrative that erases the complexity of
country and Indigenous history. But in this image the stereotypical ‘Australian’
landscape is flipped upside down and made unclear through the rippling of
water and layering of images slightly out of sync, becoming more like a dream.
Presenting the video work through an immersive video projection further
emphasises the physicality of being within this environment, while also
highlighting the unreality of this space.
Within the video work the movement from black to white refers to the opposing
and overlaid histories of colonial and Indigenous histories, an ongoing shift
between moments in time. The prints inhabit the space as both photography and
sculpture, and the fabric that hangs closely to them follows their shape, but does
so unevenly. This fabric layer both covers up and creates more nuances to the
landscape, extending its boundaries and making its viewing unclear, and again
uncertain.