Cuttings

Cuttings, 2017.
Digital inkjet prints.

The “Cuttings” series explores action based incursions on the natural landscape through human intervention into vegetation and land structures as well are a more micro view of the ritualised activity of clearing trees.

The western understanding of location is achieved through segmentation of the landscape by roads, fences and signposts. Elements such as these become components of geography, spatial understanding and crucial to the development of place. Large cuttings through bushland for electricity and roads transform the landscape for values of convenience and connection, while great swathes of vegetation are uprooted and replaced with pine plantations reserved for decades to come.

Images of tree stems and branches cut during hazard reduction for the bushfire season show a close-up view of landscape alteration. They are transformed by the ritual of cutting, collecting and binding, and become objects with deeper symbolic meaning. As enquires into landscape, these images convey the natural environment as an aspect of the industrialised world — far from the Arcadian vision of the past.