Dominion

Dominion came about as a pursuit of the medieval history of Europe and the nascent drive to impose habitable order onto chaotic nature. The instinctive desire to establish sovereignty, boundary and dominion over land, sea and sky—the roots of what would later become national identity. How did the Westphalian nation state come about, what preceded it, how was it conceptualised and how is it maintained?

This work explores an idea of dominion over nature. The human drive to encircle, to border, to boundary, to protect, to organise and ultimately to compete and coexist. The abstract mental maps of the ancient landscape that became cartographers' lines as little by little all that is was identified, encapsulated and classified.

I wanted to look at the instinctive aspiration toward the establishment of an all encompassing human domain, long before it was realised. To represent a sense of the earliest emergence of these ideas, long ago.

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