Artists statement

She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile
works with land through photographs that are cut, reassembled, and sutured into collaged forms.
The seams have been left open; the ruptures are central to each work.
Observing the sutured landscapes becomes a meditation on responsibility
and on the uneasy coexistence of care, complicity, and inherited harm.
The collages return the act of looking back onto the viewer, presenting their scars.
To engage with them is to confront one’s position within ongoing colonial systems
and to acknowledge the violences that remain embedded in the land
and in the systems that have fractured its sovereignty.
To look to the land is to feel the weight of what has been done to it and to those who belong to it,
while recognising how it continues to nourish, restore, and strengthen.
Looking demands attentiveness and accountability,
insisting on the ethical and relational dimensions of vision itself.
The images collaged throughout
She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile
combine photographs taken by the artist
on unceded Country in south-western Victoria over the past decade
—across the lands of the Wauthaurong, Bunurong, Wadawurrung, and Gunditjmara
—with archival material sourced from the State Library of Victoria of the same areas.
The archival images, produced exclusively by white colonial settler photographers,
documented and mapped the land, creating visual records
that both precede and actively participate in the colonial inscription of place.
By bringing these materials into dialogue,
the work creates a confrontation between lived Indigenous presence
and the extractive logic of the colonial archive.

Physical description

A series of ten photographic collages 2O.5 X 15CM EACH