Liss Fenwick

Humpty Doom spans two decades of work that began when the artist was a teenager and continued over twenty years, tracing three generations of her family in northern Australia, on Aboriginal land. The project intertwines family memory and colonial history within a landscape increasingly shaped by climate change and marked by tensions between Aboriginal Country, military infrastructure and industrial development. Fenwick challenges conventional landscape photography, which has often portrayed the environment as a passive stage for human activity or a resource to be exploited. Instead, she treats trees, termite mounds, pandanus palms, wetlands and insects as portrait subjects, active participants within a shared ecological drama. Her perspective is informed by the Aboriginal knowledge systems she encountered while living on Larrakia Country, which emphasise relationships to land rather than ownership of it. Humour, affection and unease coexist throughout the work, reflecting the contradictions of the Northern Territory, where extractive policies such as the ambition to “develop the north” persist even as the region becomes one of the most climate-vulnerable areas of Australia. Fenwick creates images that make room for complexity, grounded in lived experience while remaining open to speculative futures. Her work confronts ecological precarity while imagining other ways of relating to, remembering and caring for threatened landscapes.