Cuttings examines how human action inscribes itself onto the natural landscape, moving between large‑scale interventions in terrain and the more intimate, ritualised gestures of clearing vegetation. The series considers how these acts of alteration shape our understanding of place.

Within a Western framework, location is often defined through the segmentation of land. Roads, fences, boundaries and signposts divide the environment into legible units that guide navigation and influence how place is valued and constructed. Major cuttings through bushland for electricity corridors or road networks reconfigure the terrain for convenience and connection, while extensive areas of native vegetation are removed and replaced with pine plantations intended for future harvest.

Alongside these expansive transformations, the series turns to close-up evidence of intervention. Images of severed stems and branches created during hazard‑reduction work ahead of the bushfire season, offer a micro view of landscape alteration. Through the acts of cutting, collecting and binding, these fragments become objects with symbolic weight that speak to both protection and disruption.

As enquiries into landscape, the works present the natural environment as part of the industrialised world rather than an untouched Arcadian ideal. Cuttings reveals a landscape in flux, shaped and reshaped by human intention and marked by the traces of ongoing intervention.

Exhibited at Collab at Pine Street Gallery in 2017.