Clarion

Between 2018 and 2022 a series of east coast lows hit the eastern seaboard of Australia and took out between 400 and 500 casuarinas on my local beach at the mouth of the Hawkesbury River. For over four years I have been documenting the uprooted carcasses of the trees, creating a body of life size photographs that celebrate the enduring power of the environment to reflect back at us the nature of who we are and what we are doing.

Litmus

Coinciding with the destruction of the forest, I have been documenting thousands of metres of black tidelines as ash and debris from the catastrophic 2020 fires in the Blue Mountains was carried one hundred kilometres downstream to the mouth of the river and deposited on the beach.

Like a dark and urgent poetry, these images bear witness to the forces of both water and fire.

As if it was harking back to its origins upstream, the ash reconfigured itself on the sand as an endless series of mountain ranges I felt compelled to record. I have document hundreds of these blackened tidelines as they were continually covered and uncovered by the shifting levels in the sand.