Palm Tree Love

Earlier this year I was very humbled to be asked to be a part of Latrobe Regional Gallery’s Spring season exhibition called ‘Palm Tree Love’. The theme of the exhibition is based around the twin palm trees that were a landmark in Morwell (Vic) for many decades until recent vandalism saw one of the trees disappear, and the remaining twin has become obscured by further tree growth in the area.

The Latrobe City website summarises the intent of the exhibition as…

“Palm Tree Love gathers 11 Gippsland artists, alongside works from the Latrobe Regional Gallery collection, each responding to the poetics, memories and interpersonal and inventive relationships formed around regional landmarks. Across an array of sculpture, painting, text, photography, mural and sound the exhibition explores how these artists have witnessed and interpreted change across the Latrobe Valley, Gippsland and regional Australia. Each of the works imaginatively explores township and the vessels of a landmark’s identity and character. Some landmarks are iconic and widely known; others are niche, held only in generational memory or passed down through communal stories and limited texts.”

I took on the assignment with excitement and some trepidation. Excitement that I was going to be a part of this important exhibition, with the trepidation is that my art shtick is basically photographing dolls exploring my existential dread. In reality, this was a good place to start - palm trees, existential dread. I found some miniature palm trees online. I only needed two, but they come in a pack of six. Doesn’t matter…they were cheap. They arrived and I assembled and photographed a scene using a blindfolded ‘Neale doll’ holding two palm trees whilst sitting on a throne made of human skulls. As part of my artist statement and rationale for this choice of scene I wrote…

“Though living in Churchill, I grew up in Morwell with a mental map of a town that does notquite exist anymore. Places where I went to school, worked my first jobs, played, socialised, and fumbled through early relationships having either now vanished or been drastically altered beyond recognition. With the privatisation of the power industry in the late 1980s, the town shifted in ways that felt both sudden and slow. What once felt stable began to erode, change, leaving behind absences that memory tries to consolidate in vain.

As I get older, those absences feel heavier. I am not just remembering places, but versions of myself tied to them…versions real or imagined. The figure sits on a base of skulls, suggesting accumulation, loss, and the weight of time, while the blindfold speaks to the way memory obscures as much as it reveals.”

The image presented in the exhibition is small… 8 × 10 inches in old money. I am starting to enjoy presenting my work in small prints with the strength is within the image, not the scale. I titled the image The Burden of Memory in respect of hardship of remembering those landmarks both physical and personal as they fade into the abyss of time.

The Burden of Memory. 2026

Dye Sublimation on Aluminium

20.32 x 25.4 cm

After completing The Burden of Memory, I was left with excess miniature palm trees. I really noticed what great objects they were in their own right, and would be fantastic if people could see them as objects, just not as props in a photograph. Thinking about presenting a miniature of the twin trees, how would that be perceived? Probably as a novelty at best. The miniature needed context beyond the trees themselves. The context eventually became obvious in my mind...the miniature was not about the trees, but the location, Morwell. The palms had witnessed the history of Morwell, so I started to look for books on the town’s history. I came across the book Steamhorse to Power: The History of Morwell Town by Prue McGoldrick on eBay…which I purchased. The book I was not only going to read, but I was going to make art out of it. The book formed the base of the small sculpture I envisioned. I constructed the miniature palms to grow from the book. By building directly onto the book, I wanted to treat history not as something fixed on a page, but as something fragile that can be altered, forgotten, or overgrown with time. On the statement to the curators I wrote…

“The miniature twin palm trees stand at the centre of the work. For me, they recall the iconic palms that once stood as a recognisable marker in Morwell, a simple landmark that many locals would recall without much thinking. On this sculpture they become a kind of memorial, standing in for the places that have disappeared during my lifetime: schools, shops, workplaces and gathering spots that shaped everyday life. They are both a symbol of what was once known and a reminder of what is now passed.”

I titled the work Ode to Morwell Town as a nod to the title of the book on which the sculpture was made. I haven’t made a small sculpture for years (decades?) and it was good to produce something different, an object that you can walk around, explore, instead of the limited viewpoint of a image on a wall.

Ode to Morwell Town. 2026

Mixed Media. Book, Plastic palm trees, miniature grass, resin skulls.

21 x 22 x 14cm.

Palm Tree Love opened at Latrobe Regional Gallery on the 5th of September to the 15th of November 2026.