Here Beyond

Here Beyond seeks to disrupt Western epistemologies that view landscape through a colonising and binary lens. The traditional understandings and depictions of landscape – which assign boundaries between the inner and outer, subject and object, and assert at every turn “the ‘proper’ boundary between self and world” (Franke, 2012) – have historically been employed to uphold the positional superiority of the Western imagination. The project Here Beyond attempts to imagine for itself a new way of perceiving landscape which does not draw such boundaries between the physical terrain, the weather, storytelling and the viewer among the myriad of other elements that come together to make up what we have come to know as the land. The field of painting within this body of work is an emergent or unfolding act of becoming, formed at the intersection of the imagined, the affective and the material. The works are presented as incorporeal place-scapes which nonetheless hold within them all the contours, depths, heights and terrains of a physical landmass. The affects pile up and subsume as sediment does, subject to the winds and tides of the human experience. I intend the works to be viewed as an intermediary zone, a meeting ground in continual evolution. I acknowledge the Aboriginal people as the storytellers and art makers of this stolen land for which Sovereignty was never ceded. I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the owners of the land where I live and work, and the Arakwal people of Bundjalung country where I grew up.

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Here Beyond (installation view), 2021

oil on canvas

1940 x 2570 mm

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Here Beyond (installation view), 2021

oil on canvas

1940 x 2570 mm

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Here Beyond #1, 2021

oil on canvas  

1410 x 1080 mm

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Here Beyond #2, 2021

oil on canvas  

1410 x 1080 mm

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Here Beyond #00, 2021

oil on canvas

2570 x 1940 mm

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