Like Rain on a Mountain (Poetics of Time)

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THIS IS NO FANTASY 

Melbourne

March - April  2026​

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Like Rain on a Mountain (Poetics of Time) brings together recurring concerns that shape my practice—time, place and the entanglement of human and more-than-human histories. Sites and objects shaped by vastly different temporal scales are drawn into conversation and function as points of encounter, where material endurance, vulnerability, and transformation are held in tension rather than offering fixed representations.

Hellenic-inspired Roman sculptures bear centuries of touch, weathering, displacement, and cultural reframing. Caves register time on a geological scale through mineral accretion, erosion, darkness, and depth that resist human urgency. Ecological objects—collected on field trips—operate at an intimate register, where planetary processes are encountered through the studio still life. Together, these subjects generate new narratives that collapse distinctions between the ancient and the contemporary, the monumental and the modest.

Here, photography is not approached as neutral documentation, but as a method of world-making. The camera’s relationship to time—its promise to arrest a moment—becomes unstable under challenging conditions of low light and extended exposure. In these moments, photographic time falters: detail slips, surfaces soften, colours shift, and duration becomes visible within the image itself.

The works hold immense durations alongside quiet, transient moments, allowing multiple temporal scales to coexist without resolution. Like rain on a mountain—momentary yet transformative over millennia—the works suggest time as layered, relational, and always in the process of becoming.

 

 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Install photography by Simon Strong

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