In my garden, Pigment Print, 111cm x 111cm, 2010
• Landscape as a represented and a presented space, is both a real place and its simulacrum.
• Landscape as an environment, whose historical formation circumscribed by European imperialism, is where we either find or lose ourselves.
• Landscape as a wounded space, devastated by our ‘ecological crisis of reason’ promotes the genocide it betrays.
• Landscape as a cultural medium, naturalises its ideological construction as if it were inevitable and ‘natural’.
• Landscape thus becomes a principle means of enlisting ‘Nature’ in the legitimation of the superiority of modernity.
The task for settler culture, is the bringing into question these contradictions and ambiguity.
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Last year I had the privilege of working with a woman from the Cherokee Nation, brought out to the Kimberley to observe, advise and assist on some of the major issues including F.A.S.D, which is now measured to include some 80% of youth in the Kimberley and may take over 70 years to work itself through the community assuming all alcahol abuse ceased today. She spoke of the “Inherited Wounding” first really observed and documented immediately post nazi Germany in both German and Jewish next generations. In one of our discussions we agreed the issues in the Kimberley were apocalyptic – in that with the removal of the caretakers of the land, and the fact that aboriginals were a key and integrated part of the ecosystem – the land has suffered. Aboriginals there frequently speak of years of plenty of food – meat, fish and grains/vegetables – but that in many cases the animals and plants had ‘gone away’. Leaving the land wounded, isolated and lonely.
Landscape prosecutes our actions.