Rainforest Nocturne is a landscape somewhere between observation and memory. This work is part of an extended series developed through visits to the Monaro, where stands of trees, changing skies and the rhythm of the road trips there became familiar markers within an otherwise shifting landscape. Rather than describing a particular site, this work attempts to suggest the less tangible experience of passing through the landscape recalling the fleeting recognition of a silhouette, a change in weather, or the particular atmosphere of a place recalled after leaving.
In this image, trees emerge and recede through layers of darkness, their forms partially obscured by veils of mist, shadow and atmospheric texture. The landscape is deliberately unstable. Details dissolve and reappear, allowing the image to move between the photographic and the imagined. Through layering, re-photographing and experimental manipulation, the original landscape becomes increasingly removed from its source, accumulating the visual interruptions and imperfections of memory.
The title of the series that Rainforest Nocturne sits within; Braidwood Idyll suggests an intentional ambiguity. An idyll suggests pastoral harmony, yet here the landscape is restless and slightly uneasy. The darkness gathering at the edges unsettles the romantic promise of the view, while the illuminated space beyond the trees offers something more elusive: a sense of distance or possibility.
In my recent photographic practice, landscape has become less a record of where I have been than a way of thinking about belonging. Trees, roads, weather and horizons operate as fragments through which ideas of home and place might be continually reconstructed. These are landscapes encountered in the present but shadowed by other places and other times, images in which memory remains active, imperfect and unresolved.