The Colony
Liss Fenwick
Perimeter Editions
English
Softcover
Edition of 800
72 pages
245 × 335 mm
2026
ISBN 9781922545596
Liss Fenwick’s The Colony is a book about books – and what happens when their authority is quietly and actively undone. Set in the distant north of the Australian continent, The Colony – Fenwick’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions – reflects on the book as a dominant form of human knowledge, and its role in a long, often destructive relationship with other forms of intelligence and history.
Made on Larrakia and Wulna Country, the project sees Fenwick return to the region depicted in their acclaimed debut book Humpty Doom (Bad News Books, 2023), which was photographed around the artist’s hometown of Humpty Doo, Northern Territory, where they grew up on unceded land in a settler family. But where Humpty Doom swayed closer to the documentary genre, here Fenwick shifts positions, enlisting an unlikely team of co-authors – a termite colony living beneath their childhood home. Gathering books inherited from schoolrooms and family shelves – texts steeped in frontier myths, one-sided histories, and the erasure of First Nations cultures – Fenwick fed the selection of colonial volumes to the termites and then photographed the remains: a dense, sculptural language of tunnels, voids, and clay scaffolds.
Using photography as both witness and collaborator, Fenwick allows collapse and digestion to reshape the dominant narrative, reversing these books’ presumed authority. The termites’ act of destruction becomes a generative act, dismantling certainty and returning knowledge to the soil, altered and unfinished. Woven amongst the pages of The Colony are photographs of colossal termite mounds, which appear as ancient, ghostly, monoliths piercing the landscape – their immense forms giving little indication of the assiduous, living commune within.
Fenwick’s photographs give precedence to native ecology and organic process over the hierarchy of structure and control; an active unlearning of the settler mindset that remains deeply entangled in contemporary Australia. In this book, the colonial fantasy is eaten away, hollowed out from within.
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About the Artist
Liss Fenwick is an artist working across photography, video, sound and material processes. Born in Australia on Larrakia Country, they work between Larrakia Country, Northern Territory, and Naarm, Victoria. Their practice explores relationships between land, extraction and settler culture, often looking to the more-than-human world for humour, tenderness and joy. Fenwick has exhibited widely, including in On Country: Photography from Australia at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, and is the recipient of the Macquarie Emerging Artist Prize and the Fineman Award for New Photography.
www.lissfenwick.com
(Source: https://perimetereditions.com/filter/Liss-Fenwick/THE-COLONY)
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
https://perimetereditions.com/
(Source: https://perimetereditions.com/About)
