Ossuary draws from a passage in Paul Harding’s novel Tinkers, which tells the story of a man who looks out at the bent and broken forms of tree branches in the winter snow, imagining them to be “the fossil yard of an extinct species of fine-boned insectoid creatures”, an ossuary of sorts. He imagines a person in the future who has never seen winter examining these bone-like forms under the assumption that they were once great creatures that roamed the earth, building a narrative of the world based on a misconception.
The work draws on imagery of extinct animals that once roamed the lands we now call Australia. These bones might be viewed from above, frozen within a pigmented veil and exhumed from the depths of the earth, or as floating forms either rising or falling across time. At the bottom appear splintered fragments of language, now either lost or disjointed, a reminder that we understand the world and its history only in fragments.
This work is not for sale.