Word: MCA Collection: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

The digital animation The Claiming of Things uses an early colonial Australian painting by John Glover as its background. Here, the untouched Australian bush landscape he originally painted for The Bath of Dianabecomes the setting for a changing landscape inhabited by Aboriginal people who enjoy its pleasures, followed by colonial figures who fence it off. Their occupation gives way to a deluge of material possessions and consumer durables which threaten to engulf the once unspoiled river valley, until a cleansing inundation and flood restores it to its natural state.

Ross introduces a hand-made aesthetic to her animations, using collaged elements taken from a range of visual sources, from colonial painting to contemporary graffiti. An eighteenth-century couple who invade the idyllic scene mark their territory with a fluorescent picket fence, dividing the landscape through its centre. Ross uses the lurid presence of fluorescent colour as a visual metaphor for colonisation and contemporary culture. Using a palette well-known to hi-vis workwear, she highlights an incompatibility between the colonisers and the landscapes they occupy. The landscape is vandalised by the colonial lady who, rather against type, takes a spray can and tags a rock with the word ‘banksia’ – a play on the graffiti artist Banksy, and on the colonial botanist Sir Joseph Banks who gave his name to the native banksia shrub. Ross’s animations are full of ironic references and wry puns which mediate the serious themes of dispossession and the environmental destruction of the land underlying her work. Her animations address the impact of colonialism as well as our disposable culture, questioning the benefits of civilisation and capitalism.