Location: East Coast of Australia
Dates: April 2020 to June 2023
This is a project that is ongoing for the moment, it is unfolding as I travel and learn the plants of place and what it feels like to belong. This first contact of ‘Place’ in 1770 when Captain Cook journeyed along the east coast of Australia, was the doorway for my European ancestors who arrived here in 1840’s. This is the foundation of me being ‘Australian’ and all that it embodies. The plants give me a non-human language that transgresses our written history, that decentres the human back to a place of anima mundi, I work with the ancient idea of a world soul, and the reconstructed spirituality of my pre-Christian Celtic ancestors, a perspective that accepts an equality, a living unity within the entire universe. I look to the unseen stories, the herstory of what has transpired. Deeply listening to people and plants and the places in between. I also look at the stars and the planets as did these men, for me it is to understand the mythological and universal forces that are guiding us, for them it was a race to domination and colonisation. This work is in progress, the images are from the Maroochy Botanic Gardens Work in 2020. Included in this body of work are memory objects and codes, textiles, plant based inks, prints and installations of found objects and plant specimens.