HUMPTY DOOM

Photographic installation, dimensions variable, 2012-2025

Humpty Doom started with pictures I took as a teenager, growing up in Humpty Doo, a rural district of the so-called “northern territory”. In the following decades I’ve explored the relations between my family and the Larrakia land we live on through photographs of our local surroundings and the three generations living there. 

In making this work I think about the problematic nature of the government’s plan to “develop the north” through industry and exploitation, the sixth mass extinction event, and the dubious future of the “N.T.”. I make this work with love.

Exhibitions

• Nominated as one of the  six finalists for the Fondation Louis Roederer Thinking Sustainability Prize.

• A velvet ant, a flower and a bird, curated by Chus Martinez, Potter Museum of Art, 19 February to 6 June 2026.

• Photo La Nuit, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 14 February, 2026.

• Rencontres D’Arles international festival of Photography, 2025 as part of ON COUNTRY: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM AUSTRALIA, Église Sainte-Anne, 7 July - 5 October 2025.

• Giles Fielke’s essay on Humpty Doom, ‘Typical Landscapes, Adequate Figurations’

• This work was awared the Fineman photography prize, 2021. The judges said:

  • "Her work expands, with great vividness, the value-judgements of terrain, land use and function. Fenwick’s series rewrites the conventions of natural beauty and barrenness, with a framing that is empathetic as it is uncompromising. Strongly charged emotive images that look at the immediate surroundings beyond cliché images. A starkly beautiful, ineffable series which presents new readings on Australia rural area which is hardly known by the wider audience outside of the country… Fenwick’s images carry an uncanny sense that arises out of the stress points of the past and are manifest in beauty found in a hostile and bleak landscape.”

• The Humpty Doom book dummy was selected as a finalist Swedish publisher Libraryman’s Book Award, 2021.

• Catalogue essay - Memory and Redemption by Damien Laing