The Colony, Liss Fenwick

Liss Fenwick’s The Colony is a book about books – and what happens when their authority is quietly and actively undone. Set in the distant north of the Australian continent, The Colony – Fenwick’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions – reflects on the book as a dominant form of human knowledge, and its role in a long, often destructive relationship with other forms of intelligence and history.

Made on Larrakia and Wulna Country, the project sees Fenwick return to the region depicted in their acclaimed debut book Humpty Doom (Bad News Books, 2023), which was photographed around the artist’s hometown of Humpty Doo, Northern Territory, where they grew up on unceded land in a settler family. But where Humpty Doom swayed closer to the documentary genre, here Fenwick shifts positions, enlisting an unlikely team of co-authors – a termite colony living beneath their childhood home. Gathering books inherited from schoolrooms and family shelves – texts steeped in frontier myths, one-sided histories, and the erasure of First Nations cultures – Fenwick fed the selection of colonial volumes to the termites and then photographed the remains: a dense, sculptural language of tunnels, voids, and clay scaffolds.

Using photography as both witness and collaborator, Fenwick allows collapse and digestion to reshape the dominant narrative, reversing these books’ presumed authority. The termites’ act of destruction becomes a generative act, dismantling certainty and returning knowledge to the soil, altered and unfinished. Woven amongst the pages of The Colony are photographs of colossal termite mounds, which appear as ancient, ghostly, monoliths piercing the landscape – their immense forms giving little indication of the assiduous, living commune within.

Fenwick’s photographs give precedence to native ecology and organic process over the hierarchy of structure and control; an active unlearning of the settler mindset that remains deeply entangled in contemporary Australia. In this book, the colonial fantasy is eaten away, hollowed out from within.

Published by Perimeter Editions
Softcover
72 pages
245 x 340 mm