I work with photography and video to generate new and unexpected relationships between people and their terrains. Imaging becomes a device for locating where one is, in relation to something else. My work is site-specific, it relates explicitly to the Australian consciousness while addressing universal ideas of relation, territory and ritual.

My work infects and reflects the psycho-geography of places often suppressed beneath economy, ethnocide, and territory. My images congeal around phenomena that simultaneously embody both the marked human and the human marking. In this way my photo/video images create a correspondence with the world.

Playful theatrical interventions and the construction of quixotic, ritual like assemblages are used as strategies of disjuncture. Interwoven with these ruptures are documents of what is already there and mediated data that has already been wrung from it by others. These devices act as circuit breakers in the routines and expectations surrounding a particular location and challenge the finality of monuments that supposedly embody its history. As a result the boundaries of truth and invention are blurred. It is elusive precision - where images become pseudo-documents, invested with a new archaeology.

It is not a question of capturing the landscape image, but of provoking it - undressing and redressing it, recomposing it in a kind of exploratory montage. Through collaboration and conversation my intention has been to reinvigorate these sites, to make old histories speak again and allow new conversations to circulate through them.

Alex Kershaw 2007