Most Darkness I See (2016 - Ongoing)


This project borrows from the discourse of the road trip and from narratives of exploration and uncovering, seeking to understand unfamiliar spaces and places. In the series, I am led by the road and its signs, they signal toward viewpoints, tourist attractions, and vistas. They lead to edges, endings and coastlines. Places at which to stop, and from which to look.

As a British visitor to New Zealand, in making the work, I imagine the limited and shrinking virtual and actual spaces existing between the experiences of tourism and those of colonisation, the violence of surveying new lands. As objects of observation and surveillance these images appear from the ends of the road: from the parking lots, the lay-bys, the edges, the sides and the dead ends. Points from which to survey, they become purposeful places, evoking the limits of what can and can't be seen. 

Sian Gouldstone is a lecturer, researcher and artist.

© 2006-2023 Sian Gouldstone
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