Overview

The Rabbit and the Artichoke Thistle are interrelated creative works that form part of an ongoing series exploring the act of becoming invasive/ feral. Through these works, I investigate how embodiment, performance, and material play can expose the residual effects of colonial occupation embedded within both body and landscape.

This series sits within my broader PhD research on landscape hauntings, examining how sites bear the residue of displacement, extraction, and ecological disturbance.

These hauntings manifest as echoes in the body, gestures of repetition, or traces within material matter. The avatars function as mediators: forms through which I encounter my own inherited colonial being and test what it means to inhabit and critique these histories.

The works draw conceptually on the provocations of Terra CULLius and PaleSTAIN

- deliberate wordplays that challenge the linguistic and moral scaffolding of colonialism.

• Terra CULLius reframes terra nullius, exposing the violence of claiming land through cultivation and culling.

• PaleSTAIN acknowledges the enduring stain of colonial complicity, how possession remains entangled in global politics and contemporary culture.

Through these reframings, the avatars become embodied hauntings - living provocations that expose colonial continuums as performative stories of now, not past actions.

Becoming Rabbit

The rabbit is audacious - an invader that learns it is good at invading and cannot stop.

Once it discovers its power to occupy, it performs in excess, as instinct. Expansion becomes choreography; domination becomes play.

In this work, I become the rabbit, just as I have become the weed - both avatars through which I explore my inherited colonial being. These performances act as embodied provocations: ways to confront and stir my inner comforts, to inhabit and disturb the privileges that underpin my own settler identity. Becoming the rabbit allows me to experience the momentum of invasion- to feel the ease of taking, the seduction of multiplying, and the discomfort of recognising pleasure within that act.

Initially, I will test and explore my own self within the landscape and mask, using performance, still image, and video documentation to investigate how gesture, costume, and site interact. This stage functions as an introspective study - a process of confronting my colonial way of being through embodiment.

Becoming Artichoke Thistle (Cynara cardunculus)

The artichoke thistle (Cynara cardunculus) is audacious just like the Rabbit - a dominant weed species that thrives through persistence and provocation. It insists on existing where it is not wanted, its lilac-blue seed heads shimmering with deceptive beauty. Too invasive to touch, it resists containment, spreading through air, gesture, and time itself.

In this work, I become the weed, just as I have become the rabbit - both avatars through which I explore my inherited colonial being. These performances are not simply acts of imitation but of embodiment: ways to confront and stir my inner comforts, to occupy the very gestures of domination and dispersal that colonial histories have normalised within the body. Becoming the weed is to inhabit audacity itself - to feel the sense of compulsion to spread and to claim.

The sculptural costume, made from iridescent felt in a hyper-real, overly vivid lilac, transforms the body into something exaggerated, luminous, and excessive — hyper-real and hyper-colonial.

Its artificial shimmer amplifies the aesthe􀆟cs of control and seduction; beauty becomes the weapon through which power spreads. As I move, the form sways and flickers, scattering light like a seed, enacting mimicry through gesture rather than contact.

The work will evolve through site-based interactions across the Western Basalt Plains, engaging directly with landscapes where the artichoke thistle thrives as both invader and survivor.

These encounters test how body, costume, and landscape intra-act through wind, light, and terrain.

Through this framework, the thistle becomes an avatar of persistence and contradiction — thriving in the fractures of empire, mocking systems of order through its excess. The shimmer of the costume becomes both lure and indictment: beauty as contagion, gesture as defiance, play as resistance.

This is a choreography of un/settling — a practice of becoming the invasive body to confront and stir my inner comforts, exposing the unease of what refuses to be contained.