Phantasmagoria
This new body of work draws upon my lived experience as a farmer in regional Queensland, my position as a feminist emerging artist, and the archival histories of my great-aunt — a nurse and published poet active in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Her writing, described historically as phantasmagoric, evokes vivid, hallucinatory imagery of the bush — a landscape both nurturing and perilous. Through her poetry, she channels a spiritual connection to land and an embodied sensitivity to nature.
My work seeks to reframe her voice within a contemporary feminist and environmental discourse, interrogating the colonial fears of the “untamed bush” and the erasure of women’s narratives from Australian cultural history.
The artworks investigate:
The intergenerational transmission of memory and place
Environmental precarity and the emotional climate of drought and floods
Visibility and erasure — particularly of women’s creative and lived experiences
The poetics of land and language as sites of resistance
Together, the works form a dialogue between past and present — an immersive exploration of landscape, identity and the spectral persistence of women’s stories within the Australian psyche.
Photos:
Stills from: Infinite Vague and Yearning Thoughts (Video 2:03)
Photo acknowledgment: Photo courtesy of the artist
