Geodetic Monuments

This photo series documents survey markings constructed by the New South Wales Land and Property Management Authority. They are identifiable markers on the landscape fixing exact longitude and latitude points. They are used by surveyors to look from and toward. Through these markers we determine, fix, map, establish territories, and carve out roads. Most often built at the highest point in a given terrain the markers come to read like a stamp. They symbolise order, control, and above all, the taking possession of land. Their materiality provides the necessary authority to this claim, which attempts to lock all air and land into a vast lattice. Connected and extended through triangulation and GPS each survey marking can be seen as a nodal point or juncture, transmitting information to part of larger vibrating network. While they may look seemingly benign, these monuments of the state are a kind of zero-point for the deracination of the landscape’s indigenous citizens—its occupation and subsequent re-habitation.

While survey colours the landscape with its ideological residues it can simultaneously be regarded as the embodiment of a more organic exchange. It has provided us with a model for constructing our own world with the predictability we have failed to find in nature. The built world has in turn given us a model for further understanding nature, in a dialectical fashion ad infinitum. Embedded within the landscape these geodetic markers are a cognitive aid that is constantly being re-evaluated with continual additions to and subtractions from the network.

While these markers punctuate the continuity of time, potentially fixing it, they like us, are also subject to weathering—fluctuations in their environmental and cultural terrain. As extensions of our bodies and minds the survey markers photographed in this series are portraits more than they are landscapes. Each marker is as different as the terrain with which it speaks. It has been my intention to re-present these markers not as permanent objective fixtures but as changeable—restoring them to the processes in which they, along with their users are absorbed.

Links

Catalogue essay by Judy Annear
Art Gallery of NSW Exhibition (2002)
Centre for Contemporary Photography Exhibition (2003)
Review for Broadsheet by Blair French (2002)