Conversations With Absent Others activates monuments within pastoral landscape as devices for communicating with the absent/dead. The monuments photographed are a combination of altered survey markings and temporal monuments created at sites where survey markers exist. The sites are located in and around Bathurst, the Blue Mountains and Lake George in NSW and ACT, Australia.

Survey markings represent a Euro-centric vision. They are used by surveyors to determine relative positions for map making, superimposing all air and land into a vast mapping. They lay claim to the land. They determine habitation and facilitate the clearing of vast tracts of land for economic potential. Survey markings are often named after dead surveyors and over time become embodied, doubling as a monument or tombstone. Conversations With Absent Others activates the embodied nature of these markers. They function as a transmitters an receivers channelling ephemeral correspondence with absent others.

The work de-emphasises the territorial and economic network delineated by longitudes and latitudes. Instead the work emphasises a temporal social terrain creating an inner psycho-geographical landscape located between the living and the absent. The photographs allow us to experience a presence that is materially absent. A communion instigated via a residue of the dead.

Radio National Interview with Debra McCoy (2004)
GRANTPIRRIE exhibition (2004)
Catalogue essay by Adam Geczy (2004)