This work was made during a residency at Geraldton in November 2011 (organized through Fremantle Arts Centre and the City of Geraldton-Greenough).

19 November 2011 marked the 70^th anniversary of the sinking of HMAS Sydney II and HSK Kormoran in WW2. In 2007 wrecks of both vessels were located at the position and depth referred to in the title of this work. Also in 2007, my father, uncle and I were among several hundred family members who travelled to the site for a memorial service. (My paternal grandfather was one of the 645 crew lost.)

This work, made up of images I photographed over the site of the sea grave in 2007 and later transferred to paper, uses the Geraldton sun in a slow and meditative process involving cyanotype chemicals, the west coast location and a pacing between sunshine and darkness. In focusing on the process and performance of print, the work seeks to engage with the ritual of grief and remembrance through the temporal and physical relationship among memory, making and place.

While the work was on exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2012, one of the 645 pieces was lost. The postcard made to replace the missing piece connects the lost work with the true story of a Carley float beaching on Christmas Island months after the battle. Aboard that float was the body of a sailor whose identity remains unknown to this day.

Precarity was filmed at Bababi Marning (Cooper St) grasslands, near the Merri Creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.

This three-in-one garment explores autonomy, control and co-operation. Printed with dye from mistletoe and eucalypt, the garment is a metaphor for the relationship between host and parasite. Traditionally perceived as destructive, the mistletoe attached to the host increases biodiversity (in the right conditions). In this work the dancers explore the potential productiveness imposed by interconnections and constraint.

In Family Mistletoe I have raised the possibility of an alternative model to the family tree.  Informed by the work of ecologist David Watson, I am interested in Australian Mistletoe and the pivotal role it plays in its natural habitats. Historically, Australian Mistletoe has been largely ignored or regarded as a menace to the trees it inhabits. However, contemporary ecological engagements with mistletoe identify it as a ‘keystone’ plant that reflects, rather than being the cause of, either a healthy or a disturbed eco-system.

Using leaves from mistletoe plants to create dyes and screenprinting inks I have printed fabrics from which I have sewn a series of six garments, each a subsequent generation from one family. These garments have then formed the props for two series of portraits. I am interested in how gender relations are reflected in historical knowledge. Like mistletoe, women are keystones, vital for the formation of the family tree, yet historically represented as incidental, perhaps even as parasites.

In March 2012, inspired by Freya Mathews’s book, Journey to the Source of the Merri. I began a walk downstream from the source of the Merri to its confluence with the Yarra. I walked with Lesley Harding, and each day we were joined by a third walker.

The walk took seven days and became an artistic re-enactment of sorts. It was not about treading new ground, rather it set out a proposition: that I could experience the whole creek, not vicariously and fleetingly from train or car window, but by retracing the steps of all those who had walked this way before. Not just Freya and friends, Hume and Hovell or Ned Kelly, but also the countless generations of people who walked and lived in this place before colonisation.