Ghost

Ghost is the culmination of several threads of influence. I grew up enthralled by science fiction films that used computerised topographic terrain mapping to visualise the surface of strange new worlds. With age however I have become more interested in how such techniques can on the one hand so effectively represent three-dimensional topography on a two-dimensional surface, and yet through this very process manage to lose all connectedness, intimacy and engagement. The fact that Ghost is a three-dimensional construction based on a two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional space only amplifies these contributors to a sense of loss.

Later in life I started to love photographing the Australian landscape, and remain interested in the different ways that landscape has been represented over time. Europeans considered Australia terra nullius when they arrived, and power was accumulated by those who subsequently explored, mapped, claimed, politically organised, consumed, and ultimately transformed the landscape. Ghost is as much about the empty spaces 'contained' below as it is about its topography, and also explores themes of integration, colonization and disempowerment.

In its current form Ghost is also about the collision of differing ideas about what landscape means to people, capitalising upon the 'new' spaces that are formed from the intersection of one landform with its mirror image.