Experimenting with an ant’s gaze: the Bull ant Umwelt series

These works are based upon macro photographs taken at the entrance of a bull ant’s nest in Seven Little Australians Park, Lindfield NSW. The colour spectrum is the bull ant’s. These images are playful in tone as I think about the extraordinary feeling of an ant looking back into my eyes or witnessing two ants during some lengthy communication. I wonder what they were saying. The first and third images are experiments with inversion, so that the dark tones of the nest opening seem to become the air surrounding the ant who is now perched above in foliage. The third image is a retake of the first, to experiment with a looser form of photomontage around the periphery of the ant’s nest, with other insects, fungi, plants and lichen encircling the single ant who looks out at it all.