"Chase" is about terror, flight, this is the unspoken space and place called Australia. Terror Nullius. Nothing is there but everything feared. This is what we inhabit in the night, the pause, the gap between then and tomorrow. This work is a story of the unfinished business between black and white Australia.I wanted to make something  simple in materiality to cast the one dimensional nature of addressed, institutional history out from the protection of the gallery walls. I wished to allow something that is quietly, intangibly, ever-present in this 'nation' to take form. This work is an attempt to convey the pervasive knowledge of a wrongly commenced national story that cannot be rewritten- one that is  beyond spoken or written language, but exists as gripping,  knowing, feeling.

In presenting a work as a commentary between the 1901 Federation painting E.Phillips-Fox "The Landing of Captain Cook" and the 1994 work "Imperial Leather" I felt there was only the space between them, that silent space we all interminably inhabit in which to work. I don't believe that Australia has left behind the two aforementioned stories but is still enmeshed in their dialogues of invasion, control and silencings. "Chase" is a visual reminder of what we want to forget but haven't faced it in order to lay it to rest: our collective, overlapping pasts and complicities.  

Ongoing because we don't perhaps have the language to deal with it.

In this installation I reference several visual elements from both the 1901 and 1994 works from which I have created this new work: These elements include:

- The colour red in the flag of Cook's landing and the coat of those in command taking aim to shoot at the Aborigines, and the red fabric toweling of "Imperial Leather".

- Multiple objects as in the wax heads aligned across the surface of the British blood red Flag, and the hands of the Europeans in the painting, also the weaponry of the guns and spears.

- Suspension in the forms of the hanging wax heads and also in the idea of suspension implying waiting and unfinished trauma.

- The notion of the Vertical which is contained within the aligned rows of wax heads in "Imperial Leather" and in the various positions of the rifles and spears, the oars and masts of the boats and the figures and flag-stick in the Fox work.

From these visual triggers I decided to create my version of the psychological space this country inhabits. This took  form as a tense, tight tea-tree forest. The kind of forest that is dark and damp, leech ridden and easy to be lost within. This is a suspended space, eery, floating in no-time between the 1901 and 1994 works. This work is intended to be a kind of emanation, aura or psychic force between them. My visualization of a place that has not been negotiated successfully and so remains our haunted house, our outdoors and indoors, our everywhere. The forest  hangs, string suspending each stick with a noose knot. Multiple sticks as the multiple heads in "Imperial Leather" and the multiple spears and rifles in Fox's painting. The view from either side of "Chase" transforms and modifies the visibility, the perception, the reading of both "Imperial Leather" or "The Landing of Captain Cook". I make the  space, the world between them uncannily visible. The story is that within the forest is the trace of a pursuit. Torn Scraps of cotton flagging and red toweling held within its grasp bear testament to a struggle within this space, a flight of passage took place and took parts, pieces of both works into this otherworldly configuration. Traces of Captain Cook's party and of the Imperial Leather British Flag which holds the suspended heads of Aboriginal Boy ornaments flicker within the tea-tree, the forest has borne witness to the start of where we are today. The fabrics are held firm through time, we are still enmeshed in the grasp of this narrative. Whilst Cook is clearly sleep-walking across Fox's canvas, his hand outstretched his face avoiding the Aborigines awaiting the landing party, I suggest that the reality is that  a pursuit came next, the chronology of reading from left to right shows that the Aborigines cannot be evaded, they are the last thing awaiting to be encountered and yet this cannot happen within the frame which Fox allowed Cook in his work. That story- the result of Cook's landing, the result of European arrivals determined to find a terra nullius is carefully avoided by Fox and offered by "Chase"- this is not "Chased" but an ongoing tension and presence in this country.