Infrared Image + text panel with a fragrance Made by the Artist 2025 Installation Images: Document Photography. Exhibited in Dreamz Curated bt Liam Garstang SCA Galleries, Sydney University 2025.
The text panel reads
In this dream, I was pointing my camera at the basalt cap of Mt Tomah but it wouldn’t appear in the camera frame. The mountain was invisible to the infrared sensor, and I had that weird feeling wash over me, just like I had in waking life back on that day in 2019 when the same thing happened.
I suddenly teleported to the base of the mountain. The scent of native tobacco filled the air and grew stronger. The smell that filled my nostrils was an even stranger version of the real thing. Alien white synthetic musks melded with bright frankincense and Timberol-like nuances, awash with transparent wood aromas. Although the smell was very nonlinear, all aspects signalling on an olfactory level at the same time, inwardly, I sensed some of the aroma molecules dancing
inside the aromatic shroud, popping in and out of perception: a bright berry-like note here, waxy peach aldehydes,
burning church candle notes, this thing was alive. All of this was enveloped in a hugely diffuse, gigantic smokiness,
reeking of hydrocarboresine. The aroma filled the air like a spectral guide, leading me forward but also as if it was
announcing the presence of something powerful arriving from the afterlife, which I didn’t question at all.
As I climbed, the air grew cooler and the fragrance became almost overwhelming. It was a scent that seemed to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, a fragrant sign of what lay ahead. I could sense that this mountain was a portal to another realm, a place where the boundaries between life and death were fluid.
Halfway up the mountain, I came across a clearing. There, bathed in the ethereal light of the unseen spectrum, stood a group of children. Their presence was both comforting and eerie, as if they existed just beyond the grasp of the living world. They were dressed in simple hessian garments, their faces serene and otherworldly. White cats scattered from
under their feet. The children chanted telepathically. Their words hung in my mind, resonating with a pulsed timing that went in and out of phase. The children began to move, their bodies swaying in a dance that seemed to mirror the rhythm of the clock cycle of the black boxes that help form reality at the moment it is observed. The children continued their staccato dance and telepathic song. They seemed to draw energy from the mountain itself, their presence a bridge
between the realms of the living and the dead. “Make sure you tell everyone about the black boxes.”