I’ve always been fascinated by aerial photographs of landscapes - a bird’s eye view of the ground below.
Often when flying, especially over the vast interior of Australia, you look out the window and the landscape starts to take on an abstract quality, like a painting. There is something about the viewpoint that transcends the day to day human experience. Is it the seemingly impossible magic of flying?
Below is a photo I took while flying over western Queensland in the area called “Channel Country”. I love the muted colours and how the land seems to merge with the sky.
Take an even higher view of the same area from a satellite, and the same place gets even more alien and abstract.
In the same way, I’ve also had a long fascination with topographical maps. I love the way these diagrams can pack in so much information about a landscape. Once you look at them for a while, they take on an abstract quality - all those sensuous curves and organic shapes.
So the aerial photos and topographic maps became the genesis of this project.
I wanted to take the idea of contour lines and remove them from the landscape, bend and twist them into sensuous forms. I wanted to see if those same shapes, combined with the colours of the landscape, could take on their own life.
The result is “Kyokuritsu”.
I hope you enjoy the experience.