Along the windows at the south entrance to Werribee Train Station is the temporary artwork Revisitation and return by Yorta Yorta artist Peta Clancy.
“My starting point for Revisitation and return is reflecting on historic landscape photographs which have shaped public perceptions of the land and its ownership. Many of these images have asserted settler-colonial authority and possession and actively silenced Indigenous presence and histories.
I create photographs in collaboration with Country and explore it through an Indigenous lens. I draw on Uncle Norm Sheehan’s concept of revisitation as an important learning event. Photography is a powerful medium for exploring place in terms of what a photograph may reveal or conceal about its history, memory or significance.
This exhibition comprises two series of work. Fissures in Time created while spending time walking along Wirribe Yalok photographing using my 5x4” film camera. Returning to Country with a large-scale print, sharing the image with Country before positioning it at the original location, cutting into it, and rephotographing it in place. Processes of revisitation, rephotographing, and cutting have produced layered images that hold multiple timeframes and suggest multiple histories and ways of perceiving place. These compositions are split between a landscape above and a watery undercurrent below — a space that both conceals and protects hidden stories.
The perspective of Country in the Aurelian photographs differs from that in Fissures in Time. Country is depicted from above — from sky Country. Aurelian traces a fragile continuum of erasure, loss, and remembrance. Shaped by time spent with the entomology collection at Museums Victoria, where I studied threatened and endangered butterflies and moths — their delicate forms suspended in time. I returned to the places where these creatures once lived, gathering soil — remnants of lost habitats — to create backgrounds for photographing the butterflies.”
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Peta Clancy is a descendant of the Yorta Yorta people, a visual artist and practice-led researcher at the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous research lab at Monash University in the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture (MADA), where she is the Associate Dean Indigenous. She is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Image caption: Peta Clancy, Revisitation and return, 2025. Photographed by Christo Crocker.
Revisitation and return (2025) by Peta Clancy
