ADAM NORTON

Part way along the highway a dirt tracks heads off west into the hills that screen the secret testing facility from the main road. In another part of this huge restricted area the US government let off 900 plus nuclear bombs during the cold war era.

13,000 kilometers away, the Stuart Highway runs 315 km past the British nuclear test sites at Maralinga, then sweeps on south past the Woomera Prohibited Area and the old rocket launch facilities at Lake Hart. Like Groom lake, it is mostly desert landscape isolated from large populations and with access prohibited to ordinary citizens. Travelling along these highways the old signage marks the borders between the different types of human exploitation of the landscape. Places we are not allowed to go or see, typographic markers to 60 years of secret missile, aeronautical and space research.

Recreating these signs unhinges them from their purely practical function and gives them a new totemic meaning. This meaning wobbles between the written content on the signs with all its historical associations, the supposed dangers of the ‘badlands’, and their new function as paintings about these landscapes. Although now removed from their origins, they chart the history of the areas they served and the aspirations and fears of the people that erected them. They are marked, scratched and stained by their time supposedly spent upon it.

Adam Norton