Landmass
Landmass 02, Moss Vale NSW 2009
The rubbish tip is a mecca for ever-changing landscapes of the human kind. This series, created during an artist residency assisted by a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, venerates domestic waste to a grand visual spectacle of consumption.
Why?? Because every act of photography is an excursion in art (you represent something while representing yourself) and, sometimes irony is the appropriate accompaniment. These two things are especially inseparable in photographing nature: Landscape photography. An image of a mountain peak in New Zealand with a still frosty lake in front of it, or a desert in the Serengeti is nothing like being in that place at that time. Maybe the picture engenders the opposite feeling, a longing rather than a satiated desire for such an atmosphere and vista.
The motivation behind this series was to create a dialogue between what we see and the subject matter; majestic structures of waste infused with the romantic form of the landscape.. with a gentle suggestion of human intervention.