Year: 2006-2008

Media: oil on board on canvas, 280.0 cm (h) x 340.0 cm (w)

Additional information: The idea behind the installation Border Protection (P.54) came from a series of sketches of lighthouses. The nearest lighthouse to my home is Norah Head, north of Sydney and, after a visit to the site, I considered how lighthouses frame and shape the Australian coast. I decided to create a painting of the Australian coast using the 147 lighthouses that frame our coastline. My aim was to form a new map of Australia using the lighthouses as a metaphor for a coast that is in a state of flux and change, with a destabilising and blurring of the notion of our relationship and sense of place to an island continent. Copland is concerned to address, in visual terms, how Australians fixate their hopes and fears on the watery border of the ocean, this wavering line that defines our cultural identity as an island surrounded by the teeming difference of Asia. (Curator of Raft-the Drifting Border Dr Rod Pattenden 2009)