Artist statement: In this series of images, I’m trying to connect our inherited cultural memory of landscape to my present lived experience in the Australian bush by taking idealised arcadian scenes from a European cultural ecology and recontextualising them in the Australian bush.

I hung mass-produced wall hangings of classical forest landscapes in the local bush to both embody and reframe our relationship between what we know and what we see.

Presenting the final images in the form of the original wall hangings brings the concept full circle, adding to the visual puzzle. This, in turn, speaks in a playful pictorial way of our complex contemporary sense of place.

robertashton.com.au