I drive around the mountain village until I meet a man who takes me through a garden. This is where the photographs begin. The land the garden was built on was tended first by his mother and for long before that, the Dharug Peoples. After her death, he kept the garden alive, returning each day to sit in her rotting wooden chair. From that seat, the garden appeared not as a panorama but as an opening: a vessel through which her presence lingered.
In all the meetings after our first he had forgotten who I was, but I never forgot who he was nor his mother’s story. I went back and photographed the garden many times. Of all the flora, it was the hydrangeas I photographed most. Their colours shifted with the soil, their fallen petals lay across the ground like woven metals, their delicate forms reflecting the branches above. In them, I saw how life moves between vessels: from soil to flower, from branch to root, from memory into the body of another.
Looking up at the reaching tree branches, I am reminded of angiograms, a form of x-ray that shows the movement of blood within an artery. Trees pass information through their branches and roots, much like how our blood passes oxygen through different vessels into parts of our body. The garden mirrored the networks that sustain us. A garden holds memory across time, just as a photograph does. Barthes wrote of a photograph of his mother in a winter garden- a picture never shown, but which carried for him, “The impossible science of the unique being”. It is unsurprising that his image was a garden, a place both finite and endless, inheritance and abundance.
The word Angeion comes from the Greek for vessel- something that holds, carries, and connects. This project is a meditation on the connections I heard whispered in gardens. The memories that linger beneath reaching branches are gathered into vessels of photograph, anthotype, and collage.
A Place of Leaves is a series of three photobooks that document a living ecology in the Blue Mountain Region, Dharug Country. The photographs explore the landscape once titled ‘The Devil’s Wilderness’, in an attempt to question the role of the photograph in our understanding of place. Each book reflects upon a distinct area of the region- River refers to the Grose River, Hill explores the top of Mt Banks, Bush represents the dense bushland in between the two. This series attempts to portray connections found within place as more than a subject but instead a living, breathing collection of life- a place where leaves grow, fall and gather.
A Place of Leaves is a series of three photobooks that document a living ecology in the Blue Mountain Region, Dharug Country. The photographs explore the landscape once titled ‘The Devil’s Wilderness’, in an attempt to question the role of the photograph in our understanding of place. Each book reflects upon a distinct area of the region- River refers to the Grose River, Hill explores the top of Mt Banks, Bush represents the dense bushland in between the two. This series attempts to portray connections found within place as more than a subject but instead a living, breathing collection of life- a place where leaves grow, fall and gather.
A year after the bushfires, I noticed a firetrail situated near my old home on one of my visits to the area. Due to an influx of rain, the bush was regenerating at a rapid pace.
During infrequent visits, I would return to photograph the old road.
Risograph prined concertina.
Photographs made on Biripi Country
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Gadigal Land