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Since returning to my home state of lutruwita/Tasmania at the start of the global pandemic, I have faced a reckoning of sorts in considering my childhood and departure from the island 20 years ago. Mid way through last year I had spent more time in the state than I had collectively done in the time since I had left. Fleeting road trips brought back interesting familial memories as I patch the way through my brain with the landscape providing a primer of nostalgic emotions. I passed the place where the bald tyres of my rusty first car gave way sliding into an embankment. Ambling through one of my childhood rural towns where the economy has been decimated by the foreclosure of the neighbouring timber mills. Through the coast with sandy memories of summers days jumping off rock cliffs and courting early pubescent relationships.
I began to interrogate these memories and view them in connection with my relationship to the material and immaterial nature of place. This series aims to consider the influences the physical expanse has on the seclusion of the human condition. It could be argued that the natural and forced tension in the landscape plays out against the collective psyche of the state’s inhabitants.
