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Buckley's Cave, 2008

Cavity: photographs by Alison Bennett

 Horsham Regional Art Gallery:8 January - 10 March 2009

Sometimes stories get attached to places. It doesn't always matter how accurate the story is, it has its own momentum. Cavity, a new series of photographs by Alison Bennett, has focused on caves in western Victoria that have a layer of colonial occupation; caves said to be inhabited by bush rangers, escaped convicts, shipwreck survivors and hermits.

Speculating that the most direct metaphor of occupying the landscape is the cave, Alison was drawn to a rich vein of sites associated with colonial myths of inhabitation. These include the escaped convict William Buckley; Miss Carmichael, survivor of the wreck of the Lochard in 1878; Bushranger Captain Melville, active between Bendigo and Horsham in the mid nineteenth century; and elusive enigmatic Black Ranges hermit David Ross.

The resulting images explore the sensory and psychological resonance of these extraordinary places, what they feel like and how they feed the imagination, the need to feel rooted, to feel at home. Her approach embraces the paradoxical ambivalence of this need and the complex process of negotiating our presence in the land.

"For a number of years now, my practice has focused on the experience of interiority and inhabitation. In this new body of work, I explored these themes through the subject of caves, many of which have a subtle layer of colonial occupation.

I am particularly inspired by the Nettle Cave images produced by 19th century Australian photographer Charles Bayliss. Bayliss is also significant in his expert use of the overlapping panoramic image making technique, first employed by Fox Talbot in 1842 (Hyde 1988). Examples include Bayliss' panorama of Middle Head Defences.

My practice has been driven by a search for spaces that produce a shudder, that collapse the space between materiality and consciousness. 'Interiority' is a term that traverses a number of relevant fields. In architecture it is used to describe the experience of being in an interior space; it is used in psychology to describe one's interior life, what it feels like inside your head. I am interested in the shudder, the collapse between 'what it feels like inside this space' and 'what it feel like inside my head'. I am interested in the physical experience and construction of interior spaces."

Caves have been extensively theorised and utilised as a subject in visual art and permeate culture generally. An obvious example is Plato's cave allegory. A number of theorists draw a direct analogy between Plato's cave and the camera obscura. The cave encapsulates the dialectic between interior and exterior, between materiality and transcendence, between seen and unseen, between darkness and light. Luce Iragaray troubles Plato's formulation of metaphysical order in her reinterpretation of the myth of the cave in Speculum of the Other Woman and describes the metaphor as 'inner space, of the den, of the womb or hystera'. The cave has also been a subject for cultural geography and phenomenology, the heightening of the senses and the embodiment of space through the restriction or indeed absence of light and sound.

This project was supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.

 Additional notes on 'Miss Carmichael's View' 2008 (stop motion animation)

This work traces the subtle movements of the ocean and sunlight in the mouth of Miss Carmichael's Cave. Standing by her tripod for ten hours, Bennett took one frame every two minutes. The resulting animation brings forth the motion of tide, swell and shadows in this meditation on the view from within the cave.

Although Eva Carmichael spent only one night in the cave, her dramatic story as one of only two survivors from the wreck of the Loch Ard in 1878 remains attached to this spectacular place. When the ship floundered on the wild cliffs of the southern coast near by the Twelve Apostles, passenger Miss Carmichael was rescued by Tom Pearce, the ship's apprentice, and they sheltered in the cave before being rescued by local farmers.

The story created a media storm and the survivors came under some expectation that they should marry. Whilst today we may be drawn in by the romantic possibilities of the encounter, at the time there was concern that they had spent the night together unchaperoned.