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In 2005, my early research considered the Australian postcolonial landscape as a dynamic spatial system, embedded with layers and remnants of past and present environmental, historical and cultural ‘places’. Enquiry focused on place as a temporal, transient space that transmutes as it is embodied and occupied by various living presences. I questioned how the postcolonial landscape might be perceived and photographically re-configured to describe and represent the transience, mnemosyne and multi-dimensional space of place. The specific site of Bundanon, near Nowra on the South Coast of NSW, was the primary project site where methodology was developed through fieldwork, and the cultural landscape was framed as a postcolonial construct. However, even earlier notions of place fuel my interest in the postcolonial landscape, and determine the key concepts of my DCA project.
The original project site of Wootoona, near Young, on the South-West Slopes of N.S.W., was my childhood ‘home’. I revisited Wootoona in 2005, to formulate the foundations of the project. This early work underpins subsequent methodology, theory and mapping processes at Bundanon, and Paphos Theatre. Postcolonial theoretical research informed on-site physical exploration and documentation of a familiar, childhood site.
The early stages of a mapping process emerged as I used my digital camera to sequentially capture traces of the past whilst navigating the perimeter of the site. I chose not to work on the actual site itself, but to traverse its boundaries. The view from the fence was significant in that I perceived it as a bridging space from which I could reflect upon the past in moments of presence. As a child I often ventured beyond the property into this space, and with the absence of strong visual references in the present, I sourced the significant, from the seemingly insignificant.
A wide field of vision, simultaneous angles of view, physical and emotional senses of orientation, the energetic, chaotic nature of memory, along with the primary significance of the ground, shaped the sequence of capture, and the process of digital composition. For‘Kaleidoscope’, ‘Whorl’and ‘Traction’, four series of photographs were taken and composited using Photoshop. Captured from a standing position, using my body as a nodal point, I photographically mapped a 360 degree vertical axis through each of the eight compass points.
Each mapped image, documents the boundary, encompasses the breadth of the surrounding world, looks down, up, back into, and beyond Wootoona. Although inscribed with the subjective experience of childhood memory, these five images, interpret an embodied past ‘captured’ through physical action on-site, and mapped, using the re-collected, reconstructed visual material evidence, or culture, of place.
Diane Epoff
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