These images of edgelands in Australia extend the work in the 2014 Edgeland exhibition at Manning Clark House in Canberra into a book. The project refers back to modernism, understood as that art practice that criticizes abstract rationality by remaining a repository for an alternative—mimetic—rationality. On this interpretation modernism is the voice of sensuous particularity against abstract rationality (eg., of economics). The heritage of Modernism is the disclosure of irreducible sensuous particularity and the demonstration of what is more than and beyond exchange in the marketplace.
These edgelands are those liminal spaces that are passed through on the way somewhere else. They are ignored and untended spaces or places where a forgotten Australia quietly exists. Often they can be found by walking along paths that cross waste ground or around the fringes of the outer suburban ring. In walking along these paths through the various sites of decay and ugliness we often find ourselves on the edge of farmland.
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- dead trees, Chowilla Flood Plain
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- river gum, Chowilla Flood Plain
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- tailings, Broken Hill, NSW
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- burnt landscape, Queenstown, Tasmania
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- King River mouth, Strahan
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- Banks, ACT
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- Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor
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- tyres, Kingscote, Kangaroo Island
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- Gardiner Creek, Melbourne
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- salt lake, Tunbridge, Tasmania
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- Murrumbidgee River, Hay, NSW
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- river gum, Murrumbidgee, Hay
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- Rambler, Waitpinga, South Australia
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- Cotter River, ACT
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- suburban edge, Banks, ACT
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- Inman River, Victor Harbor