Collection: Lost in the Bush

Lost in the Bush emerged from an exploration of Australian language, suburban symbolism, and the quiet absurdity hidden within everyday objects. Developed while living in Coffs Harbour, the series transformed ordinary domestic, natural, and symbolic fragments into intimate staged macro photographs suspended between humour, memory, ritual, and abstraction.

Inspired by the many Australian expressions and compound words containing “bush,” the collection playfully reimagines the idea of the Australian landscape through constructed still life environments assembled from found objects, textures, fibres, religious icons, kitchen ingredients, artificial flowers, and natural forms. Through extreme close focus and shallow depth of field, familiar objects shift into heightened psychological terrains where meaning becomes fluid and open-ended.

Part conceptual photography, part visual theatre, Lost in the Bush draws on Raymond Mather’s background in choreography, staging, and visual storytelling. Each work behaves like a small performance, intimate, tactile, sensual, humorous, and occasionally unsettling, inviting viewers to reconsider the emotional and symbolic narratives embedded within ordinary things.

Balancing suburban surrealism with poetic abstraction, the collection explores the intersection between language, body, memory, identity, and Australian cultural mythology, transforming the everyday into something both strangely familiar and quietly otherworldly.

Further reading and behind the scenes information of the Lost in the Bush exhibition is available in the ART1 Journal.