This exhibition brings together works inspired by the artist’s travels through Australia, India, Cuba, and Costa Rica, landscapes shaped by complex histories of colonial encounters. Though geographically and culturally distinct, these places often appeared strikingly familiar. Each retains its own identity, yet layers of European influence have left shared traces that create unexpected common ground.
Kate Grenville’s The Secret River reflects the imposition of European ideas of land ownership onto territories already sustained through Indigenous knowledge and stewardship. The declaration of land as “mine” reveals a worldview rooted in possession, one that often disregarded existing relationships to place.
Colonisation, however, was not only an act of imposition but also of longing. Settlers sought to recreate fragments of “home” in unfamiliar environments. Yet such efforts frequently failed as the new found land resisted to host these foreign interventions. As Grenville writes, “The roses never put their roots down… the turf yellowed and shrivelled and finally blew away in wisps of dry straw.” These failed transplants expose the limits of imposed belonging and extend the notion of “borrowed territories”: while cultural forms could be carried across borders, the land retained its own conditions and agency.
This tension between transplantation and resistance resonates with Anthropophagy, the Brazilian modernist concept proposed by Oswald de Andrade and embraced by artists such as Tarsila do Amaral. Here, cultural identity emerges through the active transformation rather than passive inheritance of external influences.
The works reflect these layered histories by merging natural landscapes with elements that evoke their colonial pasts. In doing so, they acknowledge histories of violence and displacement while tracing the transformations that followed. The resulting images depict places where cultures intersect and identities are continually reconfigured.
This complexity is echoed in the drawings themselves, where specific geographies often blur. It can be difficult to locate a single origin, as each landscape carries traces of others—forming a visual patchwork shaped by shared histories.
Ultimately, Borrowed Territories considers landscapes as sites of encounter, memory, and negotiation. Shaped by the movement of people, plants, and ideas, they remain grounded in their own enduring presence, each equally deserving of recognition and care.