In the Cold Light of Stars

Made on Yuin Country, NSW, this series reimagines ancient coastal rock as constellation and deep space, a personal reckoning with belonging, loss, and land that precedes and outlasts us.

I began this series during a difficult return to Australia. My family was debating the sale of our holiday house on the NSW South Coast, a place that shaped my childhood. After four years in Germany I felt suspended between places; not quite at home there, and suddenly uncertain here. Nostalgia sharpened into an ache for the time when my siblings and I played on that shore without measure.

On a long walk along the beach and rock shelves, my perception slipped; stone read like sky. As a child I would wander these same shelves for hours, looking at the rock and into the rock pools, lost in my own imagination. The surfaces were never just rock; salt crusts, coral remnants, fragments of shell and sand, periwinkles tracing their slow patterns across the stone. Creating this series felt like a return to that state, only this time with a camera in my hand.

The beach house was built by my grandfather in the 1950s. Long before that, the area was used for colonial logging, and far longer still it has been and remains Yuin Country. The rock here is hundreds of millions of years old; humans, by comparison, arrived only moments ago.

These pictures sit inside that scale. They ask whether what I miss is a place, a time, or a story I told myself about belonging. They look at land as more than property, something we move through and are shaped by, while the images reimagine rock as constellation, and surface as a map of deep time. Each tide erases and renews these surfaces; what I photographed exists now only in these images. Perhaps it is in that space between belonging and not belonging, between one shore and another, that we come to understand what a place truly means to us. The work turns a private fracture into a wider question: how do we belong to a place that precedes and outlasts us?