"The car stops. I open the door and place my feet on the earth, which is ashen, rocky. The air outside is filled with dewy moisture and I take a deep breath, clearing my lungs. A few feet away, ferns rise up encasing the carpark and slightly obscuring a pathway through the bushes. Vibrant bird calls pierce through the silence, forming a serene polyphonic score. I walk through the clearing.

This is Kooragang Island. Located just outside Newcastle’s city centre, the nature reserve stretches all the way from Sandgate at its western borders, down to Stockton at it east. Situated on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, the area has a rich and lengthy history: as a site of Indigenous dwelling spanning back thousands of years, followed by colonial occupation and farming from the early 19th century. Today, Kooragang Island is home to a nature reserve, a 19th century schoolmasters house, a heritage air-force station, and series of industrial export plants. It is a landscape pulsing with life and history, energy and memory, scars of colonisation and pockets of vibrant resistance.

Having been based in the Hunter for the last ten years, artist James Rhodes is deeply connected to its landscapes, and his new body of work takes the complexities of Kooragang as its central focus. In Kooragang Island, Rhodes ruminates on the quiet mysteries of the Kooragang wetlands, juxtaposing scenes of the estuary against that which cannot be seen. Primarily a photographer, Rhodes’ practice has expanded to encompass interdisciplinary ways of working, drawing on painting, sculpture, and video to probe at the affective power of the photographic object. Interweaving these disciplinary approaches, Kooragang Island untangles relationship to place, memory, and truth through conceptually charged artefacts to generate imaginative possibility.

Most works in Kooragang Island take their basis in images of sceneries developed on silver gelatin. From quietly shuffling shrubs looking up to a lonesome palm tree, to rippling reeds mirrored hauntingly atop a body of water, each of Rhodes’ chosen scenes contain both a sense of stillness and movement, as if unfinished stories with answers lying just out of frame. This intentional duality is Rhodes first language, and one he deploys with ease. However, Kooragang Island sees the artist extend into new material and expressive realms, liberating the image from its purely mimetic function and transforming it into a site of imaginative possibility.

Mounting his prints on board, Rhodes thickens materiality through hand-painting atop and intervening in the landscapes with geometric abstractions. Placement of the images is paramount, and blank space is deployed to make us aware of that which lies out of view. Scenes end suddenly and jarringly, and unfinished edges recall waste matter left to rot in the estuary, remnants of careless passers-by. Similarly do the abstractions complicate interpretation of the scenes. Mimicking landscape forms and teasing out connections of shape and structure, these abstractions challenge the quiet reprieve of the nature snapshot with a distinct layer of mystery. Like spears thrown just so, they physically impose a weight, movement, and subjectivity that can only be hinted at in the photographs themselves, intervening not just visually, but conceptually too. In their distinct materiality and formal ambiguity, Rhodes’ painted interruptions create a mimetic distance, tearing us from the certainty the photograph’s objective reality, and creating space for imagination."