Margaret Ambridge

I began to explore the idea of ‘out of place’ and ‘having no place’ and a place one can call one’s own while travelling through the Gawler Ranges last year.

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Major investigations are underway to understand how an invasive cactus from southern California is invading the ranges; its aggressive spikes buried themselves in my leg when I ventured too close and could only be removed with a pair of pliers. It was easy to see how the ‘invader’ moved around, attaching itself to naive kangaroos and unfortunate sheep. Visually misshapen in comparison to the local flora, and aggressive, it’s easy not to love it.

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I started thinking about how the landscape would look if the invader really took hold, and my thoughts extended to the sheep, the Europeans, and the car races held on the dry salt lake bed.

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Reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s essay title ‘A room of one’s own’ , one cannot but feel concern for the landscape that is losing its ‘room’.

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The idea of individual rooms for each of us is all well and good, but inevitably these desires intersect with the lives of others. Should the weed ‘go back where it came from’? Does the weed have a right to space, to ‘a room of one’s own’?

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Where do your sympathies lie? Are they oppositional?

It seems to me to be beyond binary.

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Outsiders as Woolf observed self-evidently exist in a potentially dangerous space.

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The work you see here is the beginning of a more detailed investigation of the concept ‘a room of one’s own’ and what that might mean more broadly, and from a variety of perspectives.