Spectral Materialism: Encounters with land-time-scapes

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Original abstract

This transdisciplinary, practice-based PhD introduces spectral materialism through art-based research encounters with ecologically and historically stratified land-time-scapes shaped by hypersalinity and colonial terraforming. Centred in the semi-arid Mallee (southeastern Australia) and read through echoes with California’s Imperial Valley, the project examines how spectral time—the co-presence and haunting of other temporalities—manifests in the material conditions of salt, soil, water, plants, and infrastructures. It asks how learning from geological, First Nations, colonial, and ecological pasts can orient responsibilities in unsettled futures. Treating the present as a crisis of time as much as a crisis of matter, the thesis critiques linear-progressive temporalities bound to Western modernity and extractive regimes. In response, spectral materialism is developed as both a conceptual framework and a critical creative methodology. Through alchemical media experiments with salt crystals, hypersaline soils, and halophytes, photography is reconfigured as a site-responsive, process-oriented practice. Salt is engaged as a material agent and ‘time-crystal’ whose phase shifts—dissolution, saturation, precipitation, crystallisation, evaporation—form a meta-chemistry that refracts deep-marine pasts, settler-colonial irrigation infrastructures, and contemporary dust into processual renderings of time. Methodologically, the project advances attunement as a mode of sensing and responsiveness to forces that are not always immediately perceptible yet are materially active. Field notes appear as para-writing, interrupting linear narration so that heterogeneous times co-present themselves within the text. The thesis is guided by First Nations temporalities—time as relational and in place—while remaining accountable to ethical limits and protocols. The contribution is twofold: a theoretical articulation of spectral materialism as a way to think time otherwise, and a set of site-responsive methods for engaging elemental media in saline environments. Together, they generate materially grounded accounts of spectral presences and open alternative pathways for knowing, sensing, and relating within land-time-scapes marked by enduring colonial and ecological afterlives amid planetary change.

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