Kai Wasikowski

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

In this project I engaged with state archive collections related to the Royal National Park proclamation in Australia. Adjacent to this, I visited and made images at conservation sites in New South Wales (Aus), Rhode Island and Massachusetts (USA). The project combines photogravure, digital 3D softwares and analogue film processes as a means to de-familiarising myself with traditional photographic codes.