About Dithered Boundaries

2026

About Dithered Boundaries explores the porosity and ambiguity of place. The installation includes smells, materials and stories collected from around Beverley/Ballardong Boodja to explore how smell disperses between bodies, matter and environments. These boundaries are porous and contingent, composed of shifting particles, moments, and encounters.

Water is central to olfaction. It is the carrier, the solvent, the medium through which scent moves, lingers, and transforms. Without water, smells lurk, trapped in the matter that generates them. Riverways, rain, groundwater, humidity, dew, and soil moisture shape how landscapes breathe and the formation of memories. Water does not simply support life, it structures perception itself.

Under conditions of human-induced climate change, this relationship is shifting. Altered rainfall patterns, drying rivers, rising salinity, contaminated/depleted aquifers, and intensifying flooding and drought are not only ecological crises; they are sensory ones. Water bankruptcy is not a metaphor. It is a material relation, one in which water is no longer a shared commons but a scarce and rationed asset, traded, privatised, and controlled. Olfaction, memory, culture, ritual, and life begin to dwindle and change alongside rivers and wetlands. As water becomes scarce, so too do the sensory ecologies it carries – life-sustaining hydration, continuity, inheritance, and the subtle atmospheres that make places feel like home. We must understand water not only as a resource but as a relational substance that binds bodies, landscapes, memory, and multispecies futures.

Within this precarity, there are quiet counter-gestures. Acts of care that hold open fragile passages of life. Individuals placing tanks of water in contested bushland areas and vast tracts of farmland. Critters gathering at these offerings create new micro-ecologies, temporary commons of survival. These gestures do not solve climate change, but they interrupt abandonment. They are intimate and transient forms of resistance to ecological collapse, sustaining eco-sensory relations in landscapes under duress.

In the West Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972, a “dithered boundary”indicates the general locality of a site of recognised Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, rather than its specific location – a colonial attempt to honour the relationships and histories of the First Peoples and Boodja in the midst of myriad settler activities. The use of “dithered boundaries” in law and cartography signal the uneasy relations between power, maps and place.

In this work, we take on the uneasiness of dithered boundaries. Smell and water both dither boundaries, flowing through places, bodies, matter and time. They materialise the fraught material, cultural, and social boundaries here, and in all places, and allude to the instability and precarity of our pasts, presents and futures as we dither about our shared futures and olfactory legacies. To protect water is to protect smell, and the capacity for place to remain legible to human and more-than-human life.