Ghosts of the Murray Valley (2023)

The Palmer Project, Palmer, South Australia

Five white steel tree-forms — skeletal, branching, dendritic — installed across an open hillside at Palmer in the Adelaide Hills. Each structure echoes the form of a tree stripped back to its essential architecture: root, branch, network.

The work reflects on deforestation and land mismanagement in the Murray Valley, where unsustainable farming practices have cleared the vegetation that once defined the landscape. The five figures stand in a paddock largely emptied of the trees they represent — present as memory, as absence made visible.

Installed site-specifically within the Greg Johns’ sculpture property, Ghosts of the Murray Valley occupies a landscape already in conversation with contemporary Australian sculpture.