Liss Fenwick's Meat Tray VII is part of a larger project that looks at historical narratives of white settlement in rural northern Australia through photographic tableaux that combine real elements of the natural world and extreme climatic conditions of this area with domestic fragments from her childhood home in the Humpty Doo, Northern Territory.

The project is a kind of autobiographical 'theatre of the absurd' that draws on Nietzschean ideas of Eternal Recurrence in its commentary on the boom and bust cycles that have dominated the settler history of this region.

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In the work Meat Tray VII a tarnished pewter plate is featured. It belongs to a set of rarely used objects in her parents 'special occasions cupboard' but now serves as a stage on which Fenwick invites the local highly aggressive and territorial meat ants to swarm on the flesh of a feral buffalo that was hunted and slaughtered by her family as pet food for their dogs.

This is a sad, ironic narrative, an absurdist piece about decay, madness and the inevitable failure of any vainglorious notions of frontier in the tropical, far north.

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Liss is undertaking a PhD at RMIT. She was awarded the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize in 2018. In 2019 she has exhibited at DVA Gallery in Darwin, and the Australian Centre for Photography. She has recently been a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, QUT Art Museum and the Banyule Prize for Works on Paper.