Pressing issues

Unsettling the landscape

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20 August to 14 September, 2025
City Library Gallery, Melbourne

Title list for Unsettling the landscape: Planting Plan

I live in the heart of Melbourne. As a 5th generation Australian of Irish and German descent, I wanted to better understand the history of this city and the land on which it sits, land that was never ceded by its traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation.

An artist’s residency generously provided by the City of Melbourne in 2023 gave me the opportunity to explore the City’s Art and Cultural Collection and pursue this question. During my research, I encountered an enigmatic collection of glass lantern slides of Melbourne parks and other unknown spaces. It is believed the horticulturist, landscape architect and writer Bogue Luffman used these images in formal lectures and in his role as the Principle of Burnley Agricultural College.

While the precise narrative attending the Luffman slides has been lost, the slides nonetheless confirm and extend the aesthetic aspirations of earlier colonisers to shape the land to make it familiar and homely.

Unsettling the landscape reflects on how settler-coloniser attitudes towards the pre-contact landscape helped legitimise the dispossession of Aboriginal land. Perceiving pre-contact landscape as an unhomely wasteland, settler-colonisers rapidly converted the area around the Birrarung or Yarra River into a facsimile of their home country. 

This exhibition of prints reframes the Bogue Luffman slides of European style parks, by visually fracturing the images and layering them over early maps and historical documents. The language and archival documents provide an insight into the coloniser mindset and combined with the manipulated slides suggest an unsettled and haunted terrain.

Unsettling the landscape invites an engagement with the city’s overlooked and unresolved histories. First Nation Peoples should not bear the full burden of interrogating our past. Descendants of the settler-colonisers also have a role in questioning how the land they inhabit was taken and reshaped.

I hope this exhibition contributes to the essential work of truth telling and prompts residents and visitors to the library to consider the history of the unceded lands on which we live and work.

This exhibition is located on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

The Watchers: Drought, Deluge & Inferno 2023-25

poussin the deluge copy 3
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Bellini Agony in the Garden 2 remade 72 dpi
Bosch_-_Haywain_Triptych final 72 dpi copy
Bellini_-_Allegoria_sacra framed 72 dpi copy
MEMBERGER, Kaspar the Elder 72 dpi v2 ed copy 2
Bosch final last judgement - fire copy
4 watcher Drought copy
poussin the deluge copy 3

Drawing on 15 –17 Century religious painting of flood, fire and desert these photomontages reflect new climate realities. European old masters imagined and interpreted landscapes they had never seen and within centuries we have made them a reality. The four enigmatic children from Bellini’s Sacred Allegory (c 1490 to 1500) populate the series, further unsettling these visions of the future.

EXHIBITED: Edge of Elsewhere, Photo 2024, Melbourne International Festival of Photography (2024) at Glen Eira Gallery, Melbourne. Curated by Diana Soumilas and the Contemporary Collective .

On Message: Environmental Prints and Posters 1978—2023, at Wagga Regional Gallery, New South Wales, Curated by Lee-Anne Hall.

The Grandmasters I

whole shot 72
AO frame blind morrison 72
climate hang copy 72
brueghel morrriso 72
brueghel taylor framed 72
barnaby joyce schenk 72
ship of foools framed 2up 72
baffoon fr 72
problems with women 72
lucretia- fragonard - big march 72
morrison porter rembrandt. framed 72
Lucretia- march 72dpi
The Death of Lucretia 2 - 72
holgate
covid wall - 72
«Portrait d'une jeune femme avec un rosaire», huile sur bois (
«Portrait d'une jeune femme avec un rosaire», huile sur bois (
colbeck new frame
not a race fr - 72
morrison 99% frame fr 72
Ao frydenberg and bosch frame 72
andrews biloela fr 72
andrews Dutton night watch
pork barrel
wyatt morrison_Duet 72
scott hell 72

Exhibition, pasteup: 31 Ferrars Place, South Melbourne.

The Grandmaster series reanimates the historical, allegorical and mythical themes of Old Masters paintings by combining them with choice comments made by our political leaders. 

Shiels started her ‘Covid sanity project’ in 2020 and during lockdown posted her digital collages on social media. More recently selected works have had public outings as pasteups on hoardings in inner city Melbourne.

Hung like a salon in a state art gallery, the latest called ‘Six Months in Politics is a Long Time’ is a collection of prints made from January to July this year. Addressing themes such as climate change, women’s issues, Covid, refugee issues, these political parodies aim to make the politics of the day memorable.

In a time of extreme volatility and flux, it can be a slog to keep up with politics, as we get lost in the fog of reporting, analysis, and opinion. No one can be blamed for tuning out. These digital collages capture the values and decisions of our political leaders on critical issues like climate change, Covid, sexual violence against women and gender equality. The Grandmasters has been conceived to visually present these key events in a new context. The actions or inactions of this government will shape how we live in the future and like the grand narratives of history, we will look back and judge them.

The Grandmasters: Lockdown 2020

detail hang
morrison aenius frame72
El_Tres_de_Mayo,_Goya,_Dan web
trump framed rev 72
The Tooth Extractor dutton web
the hang
FRydenberg Carravagio 72 fr
potato eaters web
morrison
taylor 72
Abbott gericault fr 72
pompeo robo debt trio cropped LANDSCAPE frame
kronos saturn Rubens - Tehan web copy
Massy_tax_collectors insta
the-plague-at-ashod 72
barnaby with text web
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  1. Scott Morrison – Apologies to Pompeo Bartoni, Aeneas fleeing Troy, (We are all Melburnians)..
  2. Daniel Andrews – Apologies to Goya, El Tres de Mayo.
  3. Donald Trump – Apologies to Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson.
  4. Wall of Shame – Moor St, Fitzroy.
  5. Peter Dutton – to Apologies to Theodoor Rombauts, The Quack Tooth Puller.
  6. Josh Frydenberg – Apologies to Caravaggio, The Cardsharps.
  7. Mathias Cormann – Apologies to van Gogh, The Potato Eaters.
  8. Scott Morrison – Apologies to Quentin Massys, The Moneychanger.
  9. Angus Taylor – Apologies to Verrio, Cyclops Working at Vulcan’s Forge.
  10. Tony Abbott – Apologies to Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa.
  11. Robodebt trio, Scott Morrison, Alan Tudge and Stuart Roberts, Apologies to Quentin Massys.
  12. Josh Frydenberg – Apologies to Poussin, The Plague of Ashdod.
  13. Dan Tehan – Apologies to Rubens, Saturn Devouring His Son.
  14. Donald Trump – Apologies to Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents.
  15. Alan Tudge, Stuart Roberts and Robodebt, Apologies to Quentin Massys, Tax Collectors.
  16. Wall of Shame – Moor St, Fitzroy.

©2026 Julie Shiels