Vine Country (Wujnur Country) 2018 archival pigment ink print on Canson Baryta paper 76 x 60 cm, edition 5 framed
Deep North is an ongoing project which examines the connection between ecology, psychology and the differing time scales within the landscapes of Far Northern Queensland. Produced over a ten-year period the images chart the teeming surfaces, stilled recesses and storied topographies of these environments. The series considers the superimposition and dislocation of spatial histories within the landscape creating dialogue between their political and mythopoetic associations.
‘Vine Country’ (Wujnur Country) takes its name from a landscape that is prevalent upon the coastal ranges of Queensland’s wet tropics. The seductiveness of its surfaces belies its presence as a symptom of ecological trauma. Intensive logging last century exposed the rainforest to periodical cyclonic damage, in the wake of which merremia and lawyer vines colonize the once open canopy, shrouding and dragging it down. This transfigured landscape becomes suggestive of psychological repression, its verdant complexity yielding to an inaccessible darkened gestalt.
