Artist Statement:

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The Reckoning Shore is a lyrical confrontation between natural splendour and quiet ecological collapse. Rendered in intricate linework reminiscent of colonial etching, the scene reclaims traditional landscape imagery to bear witness to the Anthropocene.

A luminous shoreline — framed by eucalypt, moonlight, and native grasses in the looming shape of the Australian continental landmass — is slowly overtaken by a tide of plastic debris. This juxtaposition of awe and sorrow evokes a contemporary sublime: the beauty of place pierced by the consequences of human excess.

 

The work speaks not with outrage, but with elegy — inviting the viewer into stillness, remembrance, and reckoning. Drawing from eco-mythological narrative, environmental grief, and the visual languages of printmaking revival and decolonial reclamation, The Reckoning Shore positions the landscape as sentient — a silent witness to slow violence.

 

It is both a mourning song and a whispered invocation: to see what has been rendered invisible, and to feel what remains beneath the surface.

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Conceptual Rationale for the Diptych Format:

Presenting the work as a diptych introduces a visual and symbolic rupture — a deliberate break in the continuity of the landscape that speaks to fragmentation: of Country, memory, and ecological time. The split functions as both wound and threshold and ponders over the arbitrary lines of state and territory. It invites the viewer to consider what is lost, withheld, or altered when land is divided — by colonial borders, extractive industry, or cultural amnesia.

This bifurcation disrupts passive viewing, making absence as potent as presence. It echoes the dual forces at play in the work — natural beauty and human degradation, myth and mourning, past and future. The diptych format thus becomes a formal embodiment of the work’s central tension: the illusion of wholeness in a world irrevocably altered.

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Medium & Relationship to Printmaking:

This large-scale screenprint (3.8 metres in length) draws deeply on the visual language of historical printmaking — in particular, colonial etchings and engraved banknotes — to interrogate ideas of value, memory, and environmental sovereignty. While digitally composed, the work mimics traditional relief printing processes through fine linework, hatching, and tonal layering, creating a deliberate resonance with early topographic illustrations of the Australian landscape.

By referencing the gravitas of engraved banknotes — sovereign objects of colonial authority — the print subverts their visual authority, reorienting attention to sites of ecological degradation and cultural loss. The scale amplifies its archival intensity, demanding to be read both as a document and a warning. It reclaims the aesthetics of colonial printmaking to assert a counter-narrative: one where the land records not conquest, but grief and resilience. The screenprint thus becomes both elegy and act of sovereignty

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Ecological Grief and Anthropocene Aesthetics -

This print visualises the quiet violence of human impact — not with bombast, but with accumulated sorrow. It situates itself within the Anthropocene discourse, where beauty and devastation coexist. The rubbish heap, while not overtly grotesque, is gently invasive — a slow colonisation of paradise.

 

Mythic Landscape as Witness -

The moon and trees, rendered almost sentient, give the impression that the landscape itself is observing, remembering, and mourning. This speaks to eco-mythological storytelling, where place is alive, aware, and bearing witness to human folly. The dual light sources — moonlight and a divine shaft of sun — hint at a mythical or metaphysical realm, drawing us into a timeless cycle of destruction and possible redemption.

 

Colonial Shadows & Reclamation - There’s a visual language here reminiscent of colonial topographic prints — intricate linework, formal composition — but it's turned inward. Instead of idealising the land, this piece confronts its desecration. The intricate detailing of the linocut-style textures reinforces a sense of archival seriousness, like a colonial etching now reclaiming its narrative. It could be read as a post-colonial reclamation of landscape printmaking, one that acknowledges deep time, Country, and contemporary accountability.

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Stillness & Dissonance -  

The ocean, paradoxically vast and stilled, becomes a liminal space. The viewer is invited to reflect in silence, to dwell in the tension between admiration and guilt — a contemporary sublime that disrupts instead of comforts.

 

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The Reckoning Shore subverts the authority of colonial etching and sovereign currency. Styled like a banknote, it offers no wealth — only waste. A once-idyllic coast, now layered with human debris, becomes a ledger of dispossession and denial. Reclaiming the language of colonial printmaking to document a slow violence, the work aims to mimic the gravitas archival etchings. The diptych renders a coastal scene haunted by ecological grief, through both elegy and indictment, it asks: “what accumulates when we stop noticing?” Here, beauty is not lost — it’s sedimented with sorrow and bears witness to the Anthropocentric Sublime.

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