Our culture has been mesmerised by narratives of progress. Hardwired into our post-Enlightenment western DNA is a vehemently expressed belief that that Things Will Always Get Better: that quality of life improves with each generation, that growth will exponentially rise, that technological innovation will make everything harder, better, faster, stronger. Strapped into our Onward Christian soldier! mentalities, we have been thrilled by the conviction that each step on this March of Progress is some giant leap for mankind.

Rozalind Drummond
Inbetweenspace 2007
type C digital print
44 x 44 cm
edition of 7
courtesy the artist

Rozalind Drummond’s photographs step outside this teleological mania. They stop the march towards some irrefutable glorious future to look, rather, at what is. And sometimes it’s a grubby corner. There are often piles of rubbish in Drummond’s work. Inbetweenspace 2005, depicts two lacklustre buildings with the evidence of a worksite between them. Scaffolding and road barricades fall about uselessly and the wood structure seems jerry-built and shambolic. The whole thing looks broken down and hopeless. Similarly, small beautiful disasters 2005-6, presents a dreary backyard scattered with family detritus. Baby pushers, buckets, skateboards and tricycles are all strewn about and sit behind a dodgy fence, its slumping structure the very opposite of the aspirational class’s white picket fence.

Rozalind Drummond
small beautiful disasters 2007
type C digital print
44 x 44 cm
edition of 8
courtesy the artist

Drummond’s images work against and worry Cartier-Bresson’s doctrine of the ‘decisive moment’. Her work provides a counterpoint to this lineage, providing not so much an indecisive moment but rather an incidental or overlooked one. Drummond stands up for the underdog moment: she sets her photographer’s gaze on the overlooked and the discarded, on the shots in-between the pretty compositions. Wrapping, dust, wool 2008, is exactly that, all very prosaically unarranged on a floor. A very short space of time 2007-8, shows the corner of a grimy flat, its dinginess undercut by the hope suggested by an open door.

Drummond’s recent exhibition How Fine the Air comprised a number of photographic series created over the last three years. Viewing each series was, for me, reminiscent of looking at film storyboards – each sequence was highly suggestive of narrative, and each was a psychologically and historically potent world unto itself. This was partly enabled through Drummond’s choice of very distinct locations: poppy fields in Flanders, ice landscapes in northern Iceland, or grimy flats in Nowheresville. Like those in Tacita Dean or Doug Aitken’s works, Drummond’s narratives are intimately bound with an experience of place. She responds to, and her images resonate with, a highly tuned spatial sensitivity. Each series is the result of her imaginative exploration of a nexus between site and psychology.

Rozalind Drummond
dreamt landscape 2007
type C digital print
85.5 x 60.5 cm
edition of 7
courtesy the artist

The exhibition was also held in an unusual location. How Fine the Air was a self-organised ‘pop-up’ show held in two units in the Life.Lab building, a slick new office development designed by Ashton Raggatt McDougall at Melbourne’s Docklands. Although I am very encouraging of ‘pop-up’ shows and of art projects housed in non-gallery spaces, I am still not convinced that Life.Lab was the best site for the images. The hyper-corporate, aggressively branded office complex seemed to counteract the determined quietness of Drummond’s images. Nevertheless, situating them in an unusual location also added another interesting spatial resonance to the works.

Drummond’s sensitivity to the incidental also pervades the style of narrative operating in her work. Her narratives actively reject a teleological impulse – an idea that there is an overall design and end point that we are moving towards. This, of course, is a narrative arc quite different to our dominant cinematic and televisual narrative arcs that, ubiquitously, run through a few trial crescendos before resolving beautifully at around 120 minutes (or, alternatively, after the ad break). We have become used to thinking about narrative in this way – that it ties up, that it’s neat, that it makes sense as a whole. In turn, we desire our life to have the same kind of resolution and shape. But life is not like it is in the movies. Life is more like in a Rozalind Drummond series. Stuff just happens, and sometimes it’s in a random order. Sometimes it does not all add up or resolve, but that does not extinguish its meaning. And, also, dust is everywhere.

Rozalind Drummond
Jesus and wallpaper 2007
type C digital print
43.5 x 33.5 cm
edition of 5
courtesy the artist

Her images also speak of the vagaries of memory. Memory is tricksy: not only is it infuriatingly incomplete and inconsistent but it also remembers weird things. It sometimes forgets the narrative crescendos of your own life but recalls, in a weirdly forensic manner, some small detail. Like the way you clearly remember the way the fluoro light hit the high sheen of your gran’s hospital bed, but you can’t remember more of what she said to you that final time. That seems roundabout and specious. Drummond’s work operates with a similar signifying system, which may favour the oblique detail over the main mise-en-scene. But sometimes these details speak volumes. As in wallpaper 2007, which presents a sad bedroom wall, the kitsch puppy dog mural a terrible juxtaposition to the scrappy, handmade poster with the terrible admission ‘Jesus tore apart my life’ scrawled across it.

In recent times, of course, our March of Progress has come crashing down, and in a most spectacular way – Hollywood would be proud of the size of this explosion. Hopefully this will really inspire a further reappraisal of our teleological impulse, a rethinking about whether endless growth and so-called progress really is good for our planet and us. Maybe we will stop the hard-charging towards some oneiric promised land and be where we are. Maybe, like Rozalind Drummond, we will stop and carefully reflect on what’s around us, whether it’s desirous or dusty. Maybe it really is the end of the world as we know it. I feel fine.

Rozalind Drummond
How Fine the Air
1 May – 16 May 2009
Unit 1 and 2, 198 Harbour Esplanade, Docklands, Melbourne.