8 January – 10 March, 2009  (Federation + Photography Gallery)

Sometimes stories get attached to places. It doesn't always matter how accurate the story is, it has its own momentum. Cavity, a new series of photographs by artist Alison Bennett, has focused on caves in western Victoria that have a layer of colonial occupation; caves said to be inhabited by bush rangers, escaped convicts, shipwreck survivors and hermits.

Bennett's work has explored the experience of inhabitation for many years. Her previous subjects have included derelict buildings, concrete bunkers and house museums. Speculating that the most direct metaphor of occupying the landscape is the cave, Alison found herself drawn to a rich vein of sites associated with colonial myths of inhabitation. These include the escaped convict William Buckley; Miss Carmichael, survivor of the wreck of the Lochard in 1878; Bushranger Captain Melville, active between Bendigo and Horsham in the mid nineteenth century; and elusive  enigmatic hermit David Ross. The resulting images explore the sensory and psychological resonance of these extraordinary places, what they feel like and how they feed the imagination, the need to feel rooted, to feel at home. Her approach embraces the paradoxical ambivalence of this need and the complex process of negotiating our presence in the land.