Long Shadowed Land - Michael Needham

In Australia, the pursuit of representing the landscape is often an attempt to reconcile a disconnection from it. It is an attempt to tame the wild and somehow contain the ancient through artful domestication. A defaulting rhetoric is often employed for repositioning this colonial desire and couching it in quasi-spiritual terms. This is the notion of a ‘sacred’ land.
Long Shadowed Land explores contemporary uncertainty towards the ideal of the sacred in the Australian landscape. It recognises that amidst ideals of representation, this land, like any other that is or has been inhabited, is foreshadowed by loss (in particular death) and the notion of sacredness is darkened by a subtle residual melancholia. In this context, each vision of the land mirrors a finite self looking out across the open terrain.