Line & Form

Line & Form #06, Darkroom Gallery, Vermont, USA

An evolving exploration of the line and shape and texture of Australia’s South West Victorian coastal territories. Regularly I travel this inland route: from Cape Nelson to Colac and on to Melbourne and then back. The landscape along this stretch and north up to Echuca and along the Murray is big on contrast yet gentle in colour. The light is direct and unblinking – harsh in the heat of the summer yet cool and muted during the long heavy winter.

Line Form #05

These images are the beginning of a gradual documentation process of the landscape’s form and contrast. It is a landscape that is dramatic in its expanse and yet formalised by slithers of human intervention: rock walls, tree lines, dirt roads, meandering cattle, ripples of plowed soil, and endless straps of red earth and burnt yellowing grass. The bush it would seem is in permanent retreat.

These images are as much about absence as they are of activity. The framing of the landscape exploits the structural interventions of human activity, of introduced vegetation and the slow forceful manipulation of the land’s physical contours.