Badlands - A Deliberate Forgetting

 There is a rising worldwide phenomenon of ‘Solastalgia’ - grieving for a lost landscape. Desert lands are in our primal history,  thrice trodden, by indigenous people, colonial conquerers and settlers, who all walked country making trails, leaving evidence, finding routes and marking meaning. There is genuine relationships that nomads have to desert country and although they are traditionally ‘stateless’ peoples such migrants develop a sacred bond to these lands where their relatives and families have traversed for thousands of years. They become part of an imaginary landscape, a landscape of dreams housing human desires, hopes and history created from lived experiences. They are lands of stories and teachings, myths and legends, as well as paths of curiosity, thinking, discovery and expanded knowledge. These are the lost lands we grieve for, where our lives were attuned to seasonal rhythms, where we knew our places of pilgrimage, our trade routes and sacred sites. I find the  historical denoting of lands as “bad” misnomers. I am interested in personalizing the female experience of these landscapes and introducing the feminine perspective into the archived historical context. If we are to ease our solastagia we need a deeper, more varied understanding of these places and to view landscapes differently. Perhaps a female vision of the aesthetic and spiritual value of these lands can contribute to our understanding and reimagining and rebranding of country. In an increasingly secular world we have lost our pilgrimages to the desert places where once we sought solace and spiritual guidance, where the acknowledge intrinsic ‘source’ of our faith resided.