Coming to Ground

All my work has emerged from a fascination with photography and gardening. Photography’s elusive nature, its early Oedipal relationship with painting, and its ability to influence human imagination, memory and perception, has driven and mediated all of my work. I also have an established garden that is home to native Australian plants and birds, located in the Blue Mountains World Heritage National Park west of Sydney.

I am a child of post WWII Maltese migrants to Australia who treasure photographs. My parents were market gardeners. As a child I worked the land of western Sydney and made photographs of my surrounding rural landscape. This region’s environmental degradation followed a painful history of indigenous dispossession that is embodied within, and continues to resonate from, its landscapes. The current unsustainable environments of post-colonial industrialised multi-ethnic suburban societies like western Sydney, reflect our disconnectedness from one another, other life forms, land, and Nature. Coming to Ground is designed as a counter-symbol to eco-social disconnectedness.

Coming to Ground is to be constructed in western Sydney mostly of local, organic and renewable materials. This artwork will consist of a native garden in the shape of a mandala, including a native tree grove, three archetypal symbolic buildings (of stone, steel and glass) with interconnecting pathways and oriented to the cardinal points. The artwork’s design and buildings will embody the harmonising proportions of the Golden Section Coming to Ground is designed to represent the interconnection of diverse peoples with one another and local indigenous ecologies. Thus it is offered as a positive symbol of renewed human-nature interconnectedness and therefore of, future human eco-social sustainability.