No Man's Land (Terra Nullius)

Poster by @christyctaylor

Ocean of Dust (Terra Nullius)

Ocean of Dust (Terra Nullius) reimagines and recontextualises the photograph Ocean of Dust in response to the exhibition’s theme: No Man’s Land.

The image itself is an amalgamation of multiple landscapes, stitched, glitched and overlaid to create a new world, a liminal space between ‘reality’ and ‘the other’. The vista itself becomes something of a no man’s land, a space that exists inbetween; somewhere occupied by and belonging to no-one. This felt like a fitting response to a phrase defined as “an indeterminate or undefined place or state”, “disputed ground” or “a piece of unowned land or wasteland” (Oxford Languages). The world you see inside the image exists only within itself, it emerged as a place not defined by geographical location but related only to the perception and experience of space, both mentally and physically.

Ocean of Dust (Terra Nullius) is an amalgamated image printed inversely onto a two-sided wooden panel, representing a binary - the thesis and antithesis of the work. Inspired in part by ‘The Courage to Matter’ by Johnny Golding, I wanted the edge of the work (painted in block colours) to represent the “excluded middle”, the often overlooked space in-between. This “no man’s land” can be hard to see when it’s paper thin, but here the edge is a subtle reminder that there is more to a plane than its surface, more to a landscape than what we see and more to the world than we can possibly understand if we never look past the surface.