Un-natural Ground

2010

c-type photographs

Un-natural Ground is documentation of the landscape at Gregory Falls in Far North Queensland. Located 20km southwest of Innisfail, this grazing paddock and freshwater swimming hole gained international attention due to reports that Australian military scientists tested Agent Orange at the site between 1964 and 1966. The area where the vegetation has never regrown is part of a crest approximately one hundred meters above the Johnstone River, which supplies the local drinking water. Accusations that the Innisfail community has sustained deaths from cancer ten times more than the state average as a result of the experiments have also been made. Structurally, the project consists of film-based scans, which have been strategically inverted and manipulated to encourage an unsettling sensation and ambiguous interpretation of place. The obscured reality operates metaphorically for the debated accuracy of the Gregory Falls controversy and invites the viewer to question the accusations and denials embedded in the site.