Five minutes at Nowanup

Five Minutes featured in the author's exhibition Lightsite, which toured Western Australian galleries from February 2006 to November 2007. It is a five-minute-long exposure photographic image captured inside a purpose-built, room-sized pinhole camera which is demountable and does not have a floor. Five Minutes depicts an inverted image of the outside environment where two botanists stand. The light from this exterior passes though the pinhole camera's aperture and illuminates the internal scene which includes the ground of the site which lies inside the room along with another two botanists standing inside. The image evokes the connectively the botanists have with this landscape, a site which they are presently revegetating with endemic and indigenous plant species. By illuminating the botanists only with light projected from the landscape itself (through the agency of the pinhole camera's aperture) the inhabitant and their landscape are depicted as inseparable subjects.