Created while artist in residence at Bundanon Trust, Eve of Reconstruction is the second installment in a science-fictional contemplation on desiring connection to a land as uninvited visitor whose ancestry belongs elsewhere. 

In this self portraiture series, TextaQueen relocates the biblical Eve, draping her naked body in the fabric of Wodi Wodi country. The ferns, barks, the burnt and blooming branches become ‘nature couture’ in photography utilising high fashion artifice to resist ethnographic projections onto the brown-skinned body in the landscape. The artist’s soft, scarred and otherwise unkempt body wears unsellable ‘garments’ that only exist in the photographic moment. These temporary costumes suitably meditate on transitory contact with others’ ancestral land. 

Commonly the ‘nature nude’ photographic genre depicts white bodies in images of supposedly passive, feminine fragility, even though the presence of those bodies on that land is most often the result of colonial violence. These works attempt to acknowledge the artist’s complicated desire to connect to a country she ‘finds herself’ upon as a neo-colonial presence. It is science-fiction that the artist exists on these lands – a result of the apocalyptic colonisations of the lands of India and Australia.