Terrain
The Terrain series completerd between 1999 and 2000 consists of fabricated, table-top landscape models which have then been photographed. They transpose particular landscapes which I have visited, and experienced partly through their association with nationalist discourses, such as the South West deserts evoking mythologies of the frontier. They also refer obliquely to nineteenth-century American painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church whose landscapes celebrated the sublime and the idyllic, as well as the patriotic, the masculine and expansionist. The Terrains resite landscape as a national(ist) projection of the racialized, gendered body, partly by their fabrication from–among other materials–bodily detritus such as hair, eyelashes and ear wax.
