Lani Seligman

Stumps & Stones

February 22nd – March 11th, 2023

Stumps & Stones is a series of photographs taken in and around my hometown of Barkers Creek in central Victoria. This landscape has a deeply personal familiarity that exists in the scratchy and skittish realm of memory. The area is known for its orchards and granite. Gorse, blackberries, and thistle infiltrate the landscape. These photographs overlap and intersect with each other, creating an assemblage of layered and abstracted meaning.   The exhibition also includes several ‘still life’ images, a medium imbued with Western conventions and a conduit for ideas of loss and decay. Stumps & Stones builds on an ongoing series of work titled Marrow Land, which probes the refraining historical ramifications of living in this marrow land, and what it means to inherit and be complicit in its colonial past and present. It explores how ecologically scarred landscapes can be represented in a materially charged way.