VB – In early 2025, I was helping my father scan some slides of his adventures in Antarctica when we noticed the scanner no longer worked very well. Glitches and RGB rainbows in the scans made them almost unusable for archival purposes, but incredibly interesting as objects to create images from. I started scanning natural materials, and as the scanner continues to break and die, the work has become more and more abstracted.

This body of work, Memory Scans, also includes many CC0 images from museum archives all over the world. Their inclusion was about representing the Australian history of colonisation. Museums are notorious for collecting objects, stories, and sometimes whole physical bodies, stealing them from people and from nature itself. As a non-Indigenous person of English descent, this history is not lost on me, and these works explore what it means to participate in the natural world, decay, and disorder through the lens of our histories.