Self-Guided Trail: Seeds of Change: Self-Guided Tour
Work 9 of 12

Exploring the influence exerted by the botanist Sir Joseph Banks on the colonisation of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, James Tylor has made daguerreotypes that re-create Banks’s cutting, gathering, measuring and recording of specimens. These compositions feature tools that correspondingly measure, cut or torture the plants, in a manner similar to the treatment of Indigenous people during this time. These works thus reflect on the brutality of colonisation.