It’s Already Happened: A Re-visioning, 2025 is an installation that brings into the gallery space my research interest in roadside siteworks located near my studio in Gameygal, Kogarah, in southwestern Sydney . The M6 site is a major road project currently excavating material to construct 4-kilometre twin tunnels underground.

The site flanks a busy road, its topography and geology drastically altered over the years I’ve commuted, prompting extended research into the area. Over the last year, walking closely along the road, I’ve questioned the balance between human intervention and environmental impact. Fluorescent orange plastic lines the road, residential verges, and the banks of a small waterway weaving through the site. Following the water leads to questions of its source, tracing back to when the area was an extensive wetland . Prior to that the sandstone presence was part of a shallow marine embayment caused by alluvial accretion, geological uplifting, then subsidence. On sunny days, the fluorescent hues reflect off concrete structures, illuminating the underside of a new pedestrian overpass in vivid orange, which casts a menacing shadow onto the waterway and the suffocating earth below. The tunnelling has caused sudden subsidence, creating sinkholes and causing buildings to slump into the void. Yet, the disturbed earth resists—even as strata erode, collapse, and dissolve into absence. The inaccessible strata of human and other than human accretions underly the geologic confusion I have always felt, where I live and work.

I take these observations to the gallery site noting its position is also on a transitory busy road. Located between a laundry and a Thai restaurant , the gallery window reflects an ephemeral movement of lights from the heavy road traffic and other shopfront signs from businesses directly opposite with pedestrians and commuters caught in the traffic passing through. The materials and forms in the installation—steel, concrete, and fluorescent, orange-stained textiles—are appropriated from the construction site environment. The work leans precariously against the wall, threatening to topple. Other objects appear to puff and deflate, oscillating between stability and collapse suspended from the ceiling. The work, like the space it inhabits, exists in a state of tenuous balance.

Functioning as a temporal marker of the transient nature of the site an addition to the installation is a twelve minute video which shows the assembly of the work, the reflections from the road traffic and pedestrians captured during the documentation. As I examine it, I see its topographical narrative shift, unfolding like a sequence of photographs in rapid succession—evoking the accelerated pace of geologic time-lapse at one hundred thousand year intervals. Eventually, the show will be over and the installation dismantled leaving behind only trace reflections—echoes of the disrupted landscape mirrored in the memory of its transformations, much like the ongoing evolution of the M6 roadworks.

M6 Motorway construction, President ave , Gameygal, Kogarah, November 2024. Image P.Coss