Eyes of the Land and the Sea is a piece that expresses ancient and modern Australia’s shared history by integrating the stories from the ship and stories from the shore into a single artwork. The first encounter between James Cook and the First Australians was a meeting of two very different knowledge systems, beliefs and cultures and it is at this intersection, where the identity of modern Australia now lies. The ‘ghost’ of The HMB Endeavour is always present in the minds of Australians, while for indigenous people the skeletal abstraction of the ship emphasises the ghostly presence of Cook and his men as well as providing an important symbol of a significant local totem, the whale.

Visually the work is an abstraction of tall ship and whales ribs, presenting a structural amalgam of the two, which speaks to the different perspectives of those first encounters, providing a conjoined narrative of two very different world views. Positioned at the interface of land and sea – the tidal zone that represents the point of Eyes of the Land and the Sea where these two worlds initially collided – the work will invite viewers to engage with these diverse stories and enable individual interpretation in regards to what the piece represents for them.