Siri Hayes, Merri Creek, contemporary Australian photography, urban landscape, 2003
Summary
Siri Hayes often trains the lens of her camera on the landscape, exploring traditions of landscape representation and the ways in which we perceive, interpret and communicate an often-neutral idea of the land to others. She purposefully composes and frames her pictorial space to this end, placing within it subjects and other props that enable her investigations into art history and points of temporal connection.
As in her 2004 work ‘The Woods’, also held in the Art and Heritage Collection, Hayes expresses something of the European Romantic tradition in her photograph ‘Crossing the Merri’. But tradition is displaced by history and geography in this photograph, as a young couple – dwarfed by exotic poplars that suggest England – stands on the banks of Melbourne’s Merri Creek, arms slung loosely around each other’s waist. At first glance, they appear as if they are historical subjects; they could be 19th-century European settlers in Australia. They are, after all, at the site where it is believed John Batman met with the Wurundjeri to ‘buy’ land for European settlement in 1835. This site and its connection to a contested colonial past is perhaps one key to the work, for this is a landscape heavily freighted with history and the modern couple at the creek’s edge appear to gaze across nothing so much as an indisputable divide.
