Photo Essay: At The World’s End
Location: World’s End Highway, Eudunda, South Australia
Participating artists: Corey Thomas, Jason Freddi, Black Diamond and Mercedes Zanker
This project is a photo essay, short movie and song. It expresses the encounter with landscape of a group of artists approaching central Australia as they pursue questions of connection and belonging.
The photographer, Corey Thomas, is seen dressing naked human forms in the refuse of the country (be it packing tape, a length or tow rope or discarded lumber). He seeks to overcome his alienation and city-bound reality by identifying with the waste on country; through that which does not belong but will always now be there. It is some kind of a model for making connection, for making sense of the encounter with country.
Worlds End is a located 18 km southeast of Burra in South Australia. The area is land of the Ngadjuri people. The journey to World's End is a pilgrimage point on the way to Central Australia. The photos were constructed and inspired by landscape: the open vista and empty church, the quivering horizon of the Lake Hart Salt Lakes, a burned-out brush land at Trephina Gorge east of Alice Springs.
Photography by Corey Thomas, Videography and song by Jason Freddi, artistic subjects are Black Diamond and Mercedes Zanker.
AT THE WORLD’S END
The photo essay plays on the tropes of pilgrimage. A naked man plays out an inverted passion of the cross with just one plank around the empty building. It's carried, erected and it falls as we resist psychoanalytic interpretation for a Christian story that no longer exists and we are indeed at the world's end.
CANOLA VENUS
A woman, draped in packing plastics and placed within a field of GM canola plant, marks out the islamic star and crescent with a dead branch, the symbol of venus and the moon, the morning star. The beauty of this thought and the subject amongst packing plastics and genetically modified food is a sign of our times, an imported symbol from another place and time overcoming the technology of mass culture into a pure joy and beautiful art.
WOMAN AND THE BUSH
The next setting is on the Lake Hart Salt Lakes, where distance no longer matters, and the horizon line shifts with the temperature gauge. In this series of photographs of woman with small bush, plays on themes of the expulsion from paradise, the production of coverings that seduce and distance at the same time. Are they hiding or are they showing?
WOMAN, TREE and the SERPENT
The final sequence of the photo-essay pits the woman with the serpent in among the trees. Another found object, a 3 tonne towing strap dresses the woman's shame. But she is not alone as the essayist wrestles with the strap, the strap turns to a whip and a threat, to an article of clothing, a covering of shame, to a tomb, a mummification, a silencing of expression, the danger of being left in a low valley. A promise of release. It is sometimes spoken of in indigenous culture that men and women are turned into trees or placed in trees, or somehow walk into trees. The final scene of the short movie clip explores this dreamscape of transformation.