TENDING THE INVASION
Tending the invasion forms a connection with blackberry (Rubus fruticosus) as a site of intertwined ecological, colonial, and personal entanglements.
Introduced to this continent by imperial botanists, blackberry has since spread beyond control, becoming condemned within the same systems that once celebrated its expansion. Instead of seeing the plant as a problem to be solved, this project embraces it as a living, relational presence shaped by histories of invasion, scientific authority, and multi-species entanglement.
Situated in acts of revisitation with watercourses across Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung Country, the work attempts to navigate what it might mean to tend to a place while being implicated in its disturbance. The photographs trace gestures of violent care, revealing tensions within conservation where protecting one life can mean harming another, reflecting on how these ecological hierarchies are still shaped by colonial systems of value that have influenced environmental thinking and practice.
Through lens-based practice, the project ultimately examines how photographs made by an invasive body might engage with contested ecologies without reinforcing the logic of control that often defines them. Recognising photography’s contentious role in such histories, the work experiments with ways of seeing that make room for contradiction and closeness. It seeks to consider what attention and responsibility could look like when navigating the tensions between accountability and care.
Angus Scott (b.1991) is a lens-based artist and arts worker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm/Melbourne. Rooted in ecological phenomenology, his practice considers how greater-than-human vantages can illuminate pathways through subjects like grief, care, tragedy and complicity.