SCATTERED LANDSCAPE

Scattered Landscape is a series of 24 canvases created together yet independently, spread along a mountainous bush track. Placed far enough apart to avoid influencing one another, every piece is rooted in its immediate surroundings and shaped by my direct response to that specific point in the landscape.

 

Over several days, I moved back and forth along the trail, applying marks and layers of pigment, with colour guided by the environment. Each painting reflects the subtle changes along the track – the shifting density of bush, the sudden clearings, and the variations in light. As I grew more familiar with the terrain and navigated between canvases, the works absorbed the surroundings – earth, fallen leaves, bushfire charcoal and other natural debris embedded in the surfaces as my actions combined with the elements – breeze, sun, and rain.

 

Brought together, Scattered Landscape forms an expansive composite artwork, each panel capturing a fragment of place while contributing to a larger, unified picture. Together, the pieces reflect how we perceive geography – not as a single, static image, but as an accumulation of moments, angles, and sensations that give a place its meaning. The resulting large piece forms a kind of abstract map – a subconscious, emotional landscape, a sequence of encounters with the environment.

 

Viewed as a single, expansive artwork, Scattered Landscape is a unified panorama that mirrors the continuity of the bushland track – a single landscape experienced through sequential moments. Yet if separated and acquired individually, each piece becomes a fragment of that larger whole, echoing how landscapes themselves can be dispersed in memory, ownership, and interpretation. In their scattered state, the artworks take on new geographical meaning: the once-continuous environment is reframed as a collection of distant but related impressions, held by different people in different places. This dispersal highlights how humans construct place not only through physical presence but through shared fragments of experience – how a landscape can be both whole and scattered, connected and dispersed, all at once – leading to larger conversations of how we inhabit, view and share our world.

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Painted respectfully on Dharug Country, NSW.