The 1978 exhibition of the series Bleeding Trees launched Jill Orr’s career as one of Australia’s most prominent and celebrated performance artists.  Exhibited and collected internationally and locally over four decades Orr’s work explores the environment, often in relation to human interaction.  Increasingly, her work has examined colonial and indigenous relationships with their shared environment.

Recently, Orr produced these series of performance photographs, set on Mitre Lake near Mount Arapiles in Natimuk. Mitre Lake is a vast salt lake that, to the artist, is like a theatre of absence. On the lake, a trans-generational haunting evokes an ancient Indigenous past and the traces of colonial endeavour are overlayed upon this.

The series entitled Southern Cross – to bear and behold is symbolic of the regenerative quality of fire and hope as we attempt to halt further environmental degradation.  The other part of this series, Faith in a Faithless Land, situates faith in our future as our cross to bear. The land is bound to the logic of adaptation and its survival will occur with or without human inhabitation. It is human survival that is ultimately at stake. Faith is invoked as we envisage our future.

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