Conversations With Absent Others

This photo series activates monuments within pastoral landscape as devices for communicating with people either absent or dead. The monuments photographed are a combination of alterations to existing survey markings and ephemeral monuments fabricated at sites significant to surveying history. The sites are located in and around Bathurst, the Blue Mountains, and Lake George, in NSW and ACT, Australia.

Survey markings represent a Euro-centric vision. They are used by surveyors to determine relative positions for map making, superimposing all air and land into a vast mapping. They lay claim to the land. They determine habitation and facilitate the clearing of vast tracts of terrain for economic potential. However, survey markings are also sometimes named after dead surveyors and over time become embodied, doubling as a monument or tombstone. Conversations With Absent Others activates the embodied nature of these markers. They are transformed as transmitters and receivers channeling ephemeral correspondence with absent others.

The work de-emphasises the territorial and economic network delineated by longitudes and latitudes. Instead the work emphasises a temporal social terrain by conjuring a more psycho-geographical landscape located between the living and the absent. The photographs allow us to experience a presence that is materially absent—a communion instigated via a residue of the dead.

Links

Radio National Interview with Debra McCoy (2004)
GRANTPIRRIE exhibition (2004)
Catalogue essay by Adam Geczy (2004)