Tim Georgeson’s Hidden Theatre comprises an installation of photographic, video and sound work created with virtuoso Kalkadunga musician William Barton during a residency at the Bundanon Trust in 2021. Walking together on the unceded bushlands of the people of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups, Georgeson and Barton set out to explore and untap the “hidden theatre” of the natural world surrounding Bundanon. Barton’s voice and didgeridoo animate the scene as Georgeson’s camera captures a kind of “optical unconscious”, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. Secret worlds are playing out all the time, hiding in plain sight.

The theatre of the landscape with all its complex and interdependent systems of life, death and renewal are rendered visible through the poetic refraction of light and shadow. The forest comes alive as a transcendent symphony for the unfolding and eventual cessation of life, as well as its lingering spiritual trace. Georgeson’s photographs and videos are bold thresholds of darkness punctured by light. Time and space become impressionistic, abstracted, ambiguous and fleeting. Things form and fall away simultaneously, as the rhythms of night and day give shape to life and decay.

One of the video works is titled Morphogenesis – a term describing the processes that give shape to an organism during embryonic development. Georgeson’s camera pushes through vines that curtain a portal into an embryonic womb-like space. A second video, Allegory of Red explores the undergrowth of the escarpment near Bundanon, a sort of natural amphitheatre that reveals the skeletal elements of an otherwise hidden undergrowth through fire and shadow play. With eyes open the artists dream these sonic pictures into being – a stark contrast to the abiding non-Indigenous art history of the region affirmed by the prior ownership of the land by famed Australian artist, Arthur Boyd.

Barton’s didgeridoo unleashes the ancient spirituality of the landscape, offering a sense of the boundless primordial knowledges embedded in Country. Wind becomes ancient breath as fire blazes a trail of light between the past, present and future. The diurnal cadence of day and night are eclipsed by non-linear time scales connecting life as we know it with the mysteries of the cosmos. Together Barton and Georgeson invoke the numinous spirituality of the landscape, revealing layers of life that are beyond colonial comprehension. Indeed, the myth of terra nullius – a Latin term meaning “nobody’s land” – was a colonial construct to diminish, obfuscate and ultimately remove the Indigenous life and knowledge of this multifaceted nation in present and ancestral terms.

Hidden Theatres is a haunting meditation on the unvarnished power and beauty of the landscape despite this damaging history of colonisation that created so-called Australia. That which is hidden in this immersive forest – spiritual entities that live on Country, including ancestors, tree spirits, fog nymphs, animal voices, and so on – are heard and become visible through connection and exchange. The result is a unique collaboration between an Indigenous artist and non-Indigenous artist whose work offers creative strategies for decolonising the land and the way it has been framed by the European settler imagination.