On Boxing Day 2016 somewhere between Aliwal North and Bloemfontein I started taking photos of the landscape I was driving through as reference images. Mostly nondescript, I gradually became interested in how these images reflected a disjuncture between the often overdetermined imaginary, and the quite unremarkable thing in itself. Over a period of 2 years my interest grew into a practice of taking photos while travelling in an effort to develop a collection of the un-composed, non-picturesque inter-urban spaces that we experience as ‘country’, and reconstitute as Country.
This expanded into a body of work that sought to explore travel as trajectory across space through time, tracing the mapping and boundary-making that was central to colonial expansion in southern Africa, first established through the development of the railway network, and eventually extending outwards into the myriad highways and byways we now take for granted as the necessary infrastructure that enables relationships through land as means to facilitate relationships to land.
What’s important to me in the selection of sets or sequences of images is that they maintain a sense of contingency, marking a gap that shifts rather than secures a single viewpoint, directing attention to the relation between the images as integral to their reading, at the same time as seeking to capture and question some of the patterns and power dynamics of rural land use and habitation.
The images above are a selection from a larger body of work.