Barbara Doran Art
Elle A Donne
Some years ago I travelled with an ecologist to far western New South Wales. It was a kind of awakening. I had been unaware of how vast the coloniser’s agricultural footprint had been. I began to learn how to read the land in new ways—recognising weed infestations, erosion patterns, shifting river courses and the vulnerability of native species.
The land felt like an old woman who had been pushed into relentless productivity. Many of these marks were left by vast sheep stations established during early Australian settlement, whose wool yields fuelled the weaving industries of Britain and helped forge the strength of empire. The more I learned, the more apparent the links between land and the cultural values of colonisation became.
I had long been interested in questions of human behaviour, health and fairness, shaped in part by landscapes I had lived in and by stories circulating through my extended family. I began to recognise the hierarchies that colonising cultures carried with them—ideas of cultivated and uncultivated land, useful and useless bodies, rightful authority and submission—an awareness that emerged in layers: first through the visible marks left on the landscape, and later through the quieter materials, performances and symbols through which cultural myths continue to shape everyday life.
These distinctions appear everywhere: in costume, furniture, social mores, gardening, weeds and the foods we eat. At times they were imposed autocratically with forceful intent; at others they moved more quietly through habits, benevolence or naivety. Whatever the intention, these ideas threaded themselves through institutions and practices ranging from medicine to recreation, agriculture and domestic life.
The images in this exhibition emerged as a visual reinterpretation of these inherited narratives. Just as writing records and communicates ideas, images can evoke another kind of expanse—one that works through symbol, memory and association.
Today we are confronted with growing concern about climate change and how we consume the earth’s resources. These concerns are not new, but what is shifting is a broader recognition that they are justified. If we are to address them meaningfully, we must look beyond surface responses and consider the deeper cultural patterns we continue to practise. For centuries nature has been associated with the feminine principle, while cultural authority aligned itself with masculine domains of progress and control. During the scientific and industrial revolutions, nature increasingly came to be viewed as passive and mechanical—something to be dominated in the pursuit of economic advancement. This shift transformed both the treatment of land and the social status of those symbolically aligned with nature.
The images in this exhibition invite viewers to reflect on where these narratives come from and how they continue to shape our relationship with the earth. They ask us to reconsider the figure of “nature”—the entity we have constructed, relied upon and exploited—and to sense again the living systems of which we are a part.