Travel altar 2 Essay

non dimenticarmi ( don't forget me)

Topography, the survey, what grows and how the waters flow, as well as our relationship to land have preoccupied me over the past two decades, since an archaeological trip to Syria and the Euphrates Valley.

In the now flooded and dammed region around Tel Ahmer in the north, I experienced a powerful response to the Euphrates River and its surrounding desert: something akin to body memory I had also felt in the Flinders Ranges where I was born, and in the Riverland where I spent time as a child.

This led me to explore notions of memory of one's homeland, and to develop my Antipodean Miniature and Travel Altar series, by way of paying tribute to the places we hold so dear yet abandon so readily.

In bygone eras when travelling afar, people would carry small encased pictures, not only of family, but reliquiae, or mementos from their place, so as to remember, or not forget the locus of their existence.  

The Murray Darling Basin and particularly that vein of life, the River Murray have been the locus of my work for several years, and are the subject of this Travel Altar, one in a series of works which hold and keep for us the memory of this fragile place.

Antonia Chaffey