Black Hill

What is landscape? I live in a region full of different sorts of beauty. Struggle between human and non-human nature has a history in many places in Australia, as does conflict between indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants. Here, there is still beauty, on this rocky mound that remains a hill even after its reduction by the heavy historic impacts of gold mining. It was dug into, altered and scarred, but it retains its own aura, under the sky. It is a place where I regularly walk. 

Black Hill was an epicentre of Australia's nineteenth-century gold rush and played a role in the global history of extractive activities and attitudes that saw nature merely as a human resource. Even now, it is primarily known as recreational resource. Imagining and understanding its continuing story, above and below ground is a challenging part of reading this environment.

These works are created on Arches watercolour paper (300gsm), using mixed media, including charcoal, rock and earth pigments, watercolour, and gouache - in ways that set out to evoke landscape as a material, living entity and an intricate place of elemental process.