The Dingo's Noctuary

This series was created in response to the death of a close friend - a very old Warlpiri tribeswoman named Lily. During our ten years of friendship she spoke to me often about the sentience of country, and about how all living creatures result from 'Country thinking things into being'. She insisted people could develop a shared language with the sentient landscape. After her death I wanted to talk to Country, as she so often did. I wanted to tell it I had loved her. So I gathered roadkilled animals and put them on light-sensitive paper with mud, sticks, seeds, grass...the bones and arteries of Country - and I let sunlight create images in very long exposures. This process became more complex as I began to understand how light works - I added several layers of glass separated by spaces, to create textures using distance - shades of light and dark. And I scratched or drew on different pieces of glass. The images will form part of a new verse novel I am writing which explores the idea, Lily's idea, of the language Country speaks. The thing I have found most surprising, and comforting too, is the gentleness with which light surrounds an object over a very long exposure. You'd have thought a lumen print would yield only a stenciled outline, but with very long exposures on elevated glass, the light gets right underneath the form, sometimes creating unexpected detail. There is something touching in this - as though the light were holding the body in its arms. When people die, Lily used to tell me, they go back to Country, because they are just a part of Country, they always were.