SEASONAL PASSAGE
2024, Found red cedar, laser etched and wood stand, 180mm w x 220mm h x 90 mm d
Exhibited: Finalist in the 2025 Halloran Contemporary Art Prize, Jervis Bay Maritime Museum, Husskinson, NSW.
Seasonal Passage reflects on the cyclical nature of whale migration and the enduring presence of these majestic mammals off the New South Wales coast. The image in this work captures the moment a humpback whale spouts, serving as a photographic record of human observation and a testament to bearing witness to this fleeting, temporal event. However, the whales’ oceanic journeys began in deep time, long before human evolution. For the peoples of the Yuin Nation, the whale is fundamental to the origins of life, and its seasonal passage holds deep cultural significance.
Soon after British colonisation many whale species in the Southern Oceans were driven to near extinction until the Australian whaling ban in 1978—an important event that took place during my own lifetime. I have, therefore, drawn inspiration from objects in the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum’s tied to the region’s colonial whaling history, including a 19th-century whalebone chair and a mid-century photo-backed glass and mulga souvenir of other local seafaring industries. My work is a contemporary interpretation of folk art or scrimshaw—the tradition of carving and recording nautical imagery onto materials like whalebone or shells to create lasting mementos.
For this work, I laser-etched a photograph onto a found piece of antique, milled red cedar. This ancient tree, Toona ciliate, is native to this region and was also nearly logged to extinction. Its natural wood grain embodies a history that predates colonial exploitation. The ghostly, delicate image on the cedar’s surface, created using a mechanical dot-matrix pattern, conveys both the precariousness and resilience of the whales’ passage. This work acts as a keepsake—a reminder that witnessing the breath of a whale from this coast nearly became a distant memory, and that we must remain vigilant to ensure the future survival of all marine life and coastal environments.