Remains to Be Seen - An Almanac of an Australian Landscape

Remains to be Seen moves through fire-scarred goldfields in Australia, where extraction has fractured land and memory. Images gather in fragments, holding a landscape of separations that remain entangled and unresolved.

Remains to be Seen is a project centred on the Central Victorian Goldfields in Australia, a landscape shaped by gold mining, colonial dispossession, and recent bushfires. Rather than treating history as something past, the work approaches the land as a site where these conditions remain active, held in the ground and continuing to shape the present.

On Dja Dja Wurrung Country, the goldfields are not a singular landscape but a field of overlapping conditions: First Nations Country, extractive industry, colonial settlement, and ecological disturbance coexist without resolution. Remains to be Seen engages this coexistence directly, resisting the conventions of landscape photography that stabilise and simplify the land into a legible surface. Instead, it attends to what remains unsettled—where histories persist, intersect, and continue to act.

Photographic processes such as inversion, double exposure, and intentional camera movement are used to disrupt clarity and fixed perspective. Forms blur, overlap, and disperse, allowing the image to hold multiple temporalities at once. In some works, Hubble Space Telescope imagery is layered with photographs of bushfire-affected terrain, bringing the local into relation with the cosmic and extending the scale at which the landscape is understood. These images do not attempt to resolve the land into a coherent view, but to remain within its complexity.

In installation, photographs are suspended from burned branches collected from bushfire-affected sites near Harcourt. Arranged as a field, the work shifts the viewer from observer to participant, moving through the space rather than standing apart from it. The branches function as material continuations of the landscape, extending its presence into the gallery.

The project engages the idea of archipelago as a structure of relation rather than separation. The goldfields are understood as a fragmented yet interconnected field, where distinct histories and conditions remain in tension and proximity. Rather than resolving these fragments into a unified narrative, the work holds them in relation, allowing disjunction and continuity to coexist.

Remains to be Seen proposes a way to approach landscape as a dispersed field of conditions, where separation and connection coexist. The project considers how these fragments remain entangled, and how histories of extraction continue to shape the present.

This project is a work in progress. An installation view of a recent exhibition of this work is available here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DXlwfTWkcsz/