Extracts from artist statement, 2007

Photography has been central to our work ever since 1989, when we started our collaboration. Our paintings exist in relation to photography: they consciously exhibit and flaunt their nature as transcriptions.

We were looking for landscapes of globalisation and entropy. We thought this is what it must be like, and it was. Military bases are a study in grey and vastness. It’s worth remembering, of course, that we aren’t documentary photographers nor is that our task, even though our work might resemble that. We’re artists, and our only responsibility is to our own artistic conscience. Gradually, we know that other images from different times and places will creep back in. For the moment, though, this portrait of force, of the hard edge of globalisation, is what possesses us.

We imagined we might find something like Andreas Gursky meets the War on Terror. We did. But add in William Eggleston and David Lynch, and the drama becomes clear.

Photographs of the Exhibition

Framing Conflict at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, 5 Nov 2008 – 1 Feb 2009, courtesy the Ian Potter Museum of Art.