The Carrick Hill estate, nestled on unceded Kaurna land in the foothills of Adelaide, South Australia, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life are encountered at once in a microcosm of the wider world.
At monthly intervals over a year, Catherine Truman and I used an iPhone and professional video camera respectively to record their walks along a defined path that traverses the natural and altered landscapes of Carrick Hill. This speculative, durational project was inspired by a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and recorded the journey?
This repeated action reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. If we keep to the path already taken, what happens to our powers of observation? If we walk it many times, does our awareness shift or is it becalmed? What can we learn anew from this repetition?
The control sequences represent the recordings of our walks along the Taken Path. Up hill, to the east, adjacent to some remnant, largely degraded native woodland, stands a large Grey Box gum tree (Eucalyptus microcarpa), dead now, but seemingly holding its ground, like a sentinel against further interference. Down hill, towards the west and the suburbs, there is a Pencil Pine (Cupressus sempervirens), encased in a strange pyramidal iron frame, whose story no one seems to know. In between is the Carrick Hill house, with cultivated flower gardens to the east, a pleached pear arbour to the west. The inner precinct of house, gardens, lawns, and arbour is separated from the rest of the estate by an extensive cypress hedge. An arched passage way through the hedge connects between the arbour and the former orchards further west, its inner walls revealing the skeletal nature of its internal architecture.
What we consciously see, what comes to our visual attention, is strongly influenced by our past experience, our current focus of attention, and our expectation of what will happen next. By definition, it is impossible for two viewers to see exactly the same scene: they will be in different locations, they will focus on different parts of the visual world, they will bring different past experiences, knowledge bases, and expectations. Watching a video involves multiple steps of mediation: from a selected view of the external world to the original recording, from the recording to the screen, from the screen to our conscious experience. Any attempt to reproduce this process can only ever be a rough approximation. So how do we represent or emulate our experiences around the periphery of the Taken Path? And for the viewer, how do you decide where to look? How much do you really see?
Everywhere you go on the estate, there are the sights and sounds of human activity: they are impossible to ignore, they cannot be avoided.
What happens behind our backs? Above our heads? Under our feet? What takes our attention out of the corner of our eye? As we take our journeys along the path, how do we avoid trampling the past? These are the remnant memories, the ghostly reminders of loss. These are our futures.
This project was initially presented as The Taken Path: a durational project, a 6-channel video with 4-channel audio installation at Carrick Hill as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. It was always our intention to create a single-screen, stand-alone version of the work. The challenge was to somehow capture the multi-view, durational feel of the original installation, with its various subtexts, yet still be amenable to a single-screen format. This version takes selected pieces of footage together with most of the text from the Control and Peripheries sequences of the installation and blends them into a continuous narrative arc. The audio has been remixed to match the video sequence.
This version was first screened at the ANAT SPECTRA – reciprocity conference at the University of the Sunshine Coast in October 2025.