The show includes 4 of the original 40 polygons, thumbnail frontal views of the houses they were cut from and that were available in the 2013 Polygon Landscape exhibition, and the essay I wrote in 2022 about the process of making the work.

Polygon Landscape is an artwork that came out of the opportunity and context provided by the first Cementa festival in 2013. Since then Cementa has become well known, self-described as ‘a biennial festival of contemporary art that brings together over 60 regional and urban artists for a four-day celebration of Australian contemporary art and the small town that hosts it’.(1) Back in 2013 though, I only knew Cementa’s most immediate context — a NSW town called Kandos, a place I knew must be unique as all towns are once you get to know them but, like all human settlements, also located on landscape that is within the continental and global context of the increasing urgency of the climate crisis. Even though that broader context crept into the way I later thought about Polygon Landscape, I didn’t set out to address the climate crisis in any deliberate way, preferring the adventure of getting sufficiently absorbed in a new place for it to show me the beginnings of a new work.

That began when Ann Finegan introduced me to Kandos in 2012 by driving me around it.  It was the shapes of the houses that began to pull me in, and as I started to walk around the town, they began to seem like inhabited sculptures: each with its distinctive front-on view, but leaving you to imagine what its sides and back and patch of ground might be like if you could freely walk in past the front gate. When standing on the footpath facing them, I also began to notice subtle differences in the presence of each house and used those differences as a way to select which ones to photograph...more

Polygon Landscape essay