“The problem is to understand these strange relationships which are woven between the parts of the landscape, or between it and me as an incarnate subject, and through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene or become the image of a whole segment of life. (Merleau-Ponty)
Inspired by the archaeological ruins and visual remnants and reminders of the nineteenth century colonist history of settlement at Bundanon, I explored process to question how on-site evidence, or the visible traces of the material culture of the past, might inform the present. A link to archaeological processes emerged. Through fieldwork, I devised sequential photographic processes to map the cultural landscape and the visual archaeology on the site. Bundanon’s historically significant postcolonial landscape is well preserved and documented, and reveals multiple layers of occupation and shared histories of non-indigenous occupation. Key areas of interest that propelled the methodology and research were: the notion of a complex, interwoven history of embodied presence; the visual configuration and orientation of the site itself; and the visual interaction between settlement and the surrounding natural environment.
Landscape must be read, interpreted and produced in some form of communication, visual or otherwise, to achieve knowledge and understanding of it (Benterrak, Muecke and Roe 25). At Bundanon, research and methodological practice developed from the need to physically and photographically explore and discover the site itself, and the location of visual, historical, cultural and environmental knowledge. Journal work documented, analysed and contextualised collective and fragmentary responses to site-specific enquiry using annotated drawings, watercolour sketches and photographic assemblages.
The physicality of my interaction with the site, coupled with the photographic practice, propelled fieldwork, and facilitated a kind of visual knowledge system in itself. Sequential photographic images which captured the texture and fabric of the ground, were collaged digitally to create a visual mosaic, a map of place. Mapping evolved from the rhythmic sequence of walking, observation and capture, whereby a harmony of motion and stillness (Cooper 38), facilitated a fluid, immersive process.
With allusion to postcolonial notions of place and emplacement, and through historical and personal analysis of the Bundanon cultural landscape, relationships between perceived dual forces are explored in works which contemplate associations between: settler and country, clearing and bush, introduced species and native, home and habitat, past and present, visible and invisible, and light and shadow.
The various Bundanon series employ both traditional and digital photographic techniques and processes, and reveal complex and contradictory relationships through a visual discourse further layered with my own personal experience and vision of Bundanon.
The arrangement of one hundred and forty four of the ground images in a Photoshop grid provided me with a ‘base’ map from which I developed experimental images which stack and blend multiple layers of information.
At ground level, the relationship between the cleared settled space and the natural space transmutes over time, as a multiplicity of layers inform, reconstruct and texture the land. In the Groundworks series, the land is mapped and divided, time and place are layered and the shadow of the past revealed, through the light of the present. The stones of the Bundanon ‘ruin corridor’ signify ‘endangered’ habitats – both historical and environmental; the divisive nature of the grid suggests non-indigenous occupation and classification; whilst the overlaid forest and riparian textures allude to the inter-connected associations between spaces in the landscape.
At Bundanon the division and delineation of place is manifest in the ‘line of cleared land’; an edge of space which divides and separates the clearing from the forest. During the last one hundred and fifty years, this drifting shifting line has been defiantly re-inscribed in the landscape, alluding to the temporal nature of settlement. Literally and metaphorically, this edge represents a boundary between home and frontier, enclosure and void, and the cultivated and the wild. Mirrored in the colonist windows of the homestead, where sandstone walls and cedar frames are overshadowed by imported histories and practices, and framed glimpses of the landscape pierce dark interiors to punctuate the division of inside and outside, the line of cleared land defines another edge of demarcation. Dual images combine traditional time exposure techniques and multi-layered digital photographic processes, to reveal opposing forces, yet upon closer examination interconnectedness becomes apparent
At the end of a long dirt road encircled by the arms of the Shoalhaven river, the visual catchment of Bundanon comprises a nineteenth century homestead and clustered out-buildings implanted on a gentle rise, amidst a mosaic of flat cleared paddocks. Like signposts in the skyline, the towering canopies of the surviving nineteenth century Bunyah pines and Port Jackson Fig guard the main house; evidence of up to one hundred and thirty years of history visible in girth and limb. Beyond an expanse of cleared land to the north, the fragile branches of surviving old-growth eucalypts thrust skyward behind the border of the forest, which rises like a frontier to signify a point of demarcation not only between the disparate realms of these two ancient specimens, but between opposing forces perceived at Bundanon.
At Bundanon, the natural environment surrounds and delineates the man-made, it envelopes the settled space. The circular configuration of site alludes to postcolonial notions of occupation of the Australian ‘wilderness’, and signifies the remoteness of the site. “Its walled circumference fits so easily around me” (Wolseley qtd. in Grishin 62). The idea of photographically circumambulating old-growth trees to map their existence, developed through the process of physically circumnavigating the settled space of the site to make the base ground-map. In Entangle (see fig. 30), and Entrap (see fig. 31), significant old-growth trees from the forest are mapped whilst circumambulating their girth, capturing sequential wide-angle viewpoints, at one-step intervals. (endnote: Buddhists circumambulate sacred objects in a clock-wise direction during prayer).Whilst the capture process documents the object on-site as evidence of occupation, the process of digitally stitching together overlapping, multiple viewpoints is more subjective – evocative of relationships perceived between natural and man-made spaces.
The decisive moment of digital photographic capture is distorted and suspended through hand-held exposure techniques, as body and lens chase and trace the shifting rhythms of light and form in the Bundanon forest, slipping seamlessly between what is real, imagined and remembered.
“Every photograph is a certificate of presence” (Roland Barthes)
My personal response to a particular landscape or site is dependent upon my physical interaction with it. As a child at Wootoona, most of my early creative interaction was performative – walking and singing, riding and dreaming, dragging sticks and drawing: action forged the creative process.
Being inside the Bundanon forest is like being inside a prism: shifting light patterns glow and stream, or flicker and flash – sometimes with subtlety, at other times like a spectacular lightshow. Combined with the constant motion and sound of wind and the forest itself, the light which I capture as it streams, brushes and splashes its way through the forest canopy to the foliage and ground below, immerses me in a mesmerising dance or performance.
My role as a photographer in the performance is paramount in these images. There is a certain synergy between my frame, eye, lens, shutter and body, and the animated forest forms. The frame of the camera viewfinder creates the stage in which the forest performs, my eye scans and seeks the exact moment in which to navigate or direct the body to step, shift, swing and rotate or zoom lens, move camera as I move, and release the shutter.
“time stretches and space dissolves in a series of uncertain reference points” (Rhana Devenport).
Benterrak Krim, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe. Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. Rev. ed. South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1996. 25, 16.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography. London: Jonathon Cape, 1982.
Devenport, Rhana. “Marks in Time: the Works of Darren Almond, Darren Glass and Olafur Eliasson” Photofile. Summer 2006, Vol 76. 53.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception “The Visible and the Invisible”, trans. Alfonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968. 253.
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