A dark exploration of Australian landscape myths. Audio visual motion assemblages inhabiting a space.

The aim of this project is to create a ‘story space’ that cultivates and challenges enduring dominant myths about the Australian landscape through perverse and abject audio-visual strategies and ‘postproduction art’ practices. The dominant cinematic myths of Australian landscape underpinning this project relate to non-indigenous Australians’ largely unconsummated desire to understand and unite with an intolerant and sometimes vengeful landscape.

This project draws on Australian writer Ross Gibson’s theories on dominant cinematic Australian landscape myths and an aspect of Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection from her book “The Powers of Horror” (1982) to challenge these myths. Metaphorically, abjection describes anything that is cast-off or excluded from the dominant societal norms, and can include people, objects, spaces, motion and stories. Cast-offs represent the binary opposite of what is accepted by the dominant societal norms, such as right and wrong, life and death, or “human and non-human” (Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 1993, 8).

This physical lived story space consists of audio-visual artworks that present an abject interpretation of trees inhabiting under-represented swamp and native forest landscapes located in Moreton Bay and Byron Bay.

Merri Randell: Artist statement

I am fascinated by myths that demonise difference. I create worlds full of beautiful, hybrid monstrosities that seduce, beguile and disturb.

I work in distorted realities, combining digitally manipulated, highly-detailed photographs with audio and motion design. I currently photograph under-represented indigenous Australian forest landscapes such as swamps and pristine national parks with deep humus and rotting trees. I incorporate audio of human consumption, respiration, digestion and reproduction with these images and syncronise the audio with uncanny, suggestive motion design. I use these materials to challenge social norms to promote acceptance of difference.

I combine signifiers of human bodily functions with trees because I think its important to de-comodify nature. I believe if we respect nature and its right to survive we can in turn believe in our own right to survive in an era hell-bent on its own destruction through over-consumption.

I feel strongly that if we embrace difference a more sustainable, balanced existence can be achieved. My recent series of artworks - ‘The Fen’ - is a playful but dark exploration of dominant cinematic myths of Australian landscape which seeks to challenge post-colonial social norms.

As a non-indigenous Australian of migrant parentage, my artworks examine relationships between identity, nature and post-colonial Australia.