Installation and detail images, The Invaders, 2024, Honey Bones Gallery

Surveyor’s levels, theodolite, tripods, branch, rock, feather, compass, vintage rake, paper, copper wire, pin spot lighting, lighting gel. 

One afternoon I started experimenting with looking at other objects through an old surveyor’s level. I created an assemblage using a rock, a feather and a tiny image of a three-masted ship. Looking at the assemblage on the desk, the artifice of its construction could be seen, but through the lens, a whole new world was made – a world of illusion. Here, instead, a ship was sailing over rough seas, charting the steep and perilous shoreline as the sun set on the horizon. The lens added a magical quality to what was being viewed.

American philosopher and writer Susanne Langer writes in her book Problems of Art, “illusion in the arts is not pretence, make-believe, improvement on nature, or flight from reality; illusion is the ‘stuff’ of art, the ‘stuff ‘out of which the semi-abstract yet unique and often sensuous expressive form is made.”

Most of this work was created and presented on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. The Rock and the Feather and the Sweet Bursaria branch come from Gulidjan and Gadubanud land. I pay respect to their Elders past and present. I acknowledge and honour the unbroken spiritual, cultural and political connection they have maintained to this unique place for more than 2000 generations.