The Sand That Ate The Sea

PHOTOGRAPHY

Feb 14

With his film and photographic project The Sand That Ate the Sea, Matthew Thorne tells the story of the land, community, and mysticism of the South Australian opal mining town Andamooka.

Photography Matthew Thorne

The South Australian desert is a mystical place. Millennia ago it was an ocean, and opalised aquatic dinosaur fossils are still found in the dirt there today. It is home to an arid land and deep, old magic. It is a place of endless sweeping salt flats and undulating flat red earth.

This is where the frontier is, and the last of the great colonial Australian frontiersmen call it home. The land is a stolen land, and a cursed land – and the magic of that wound has a unique way of working on the people that are born there new, and those who came before.

“These photos are a documentation of the community of Andamooka, of its dance with the grit and dreaming of Australia, and the curse of its colonial sins.”

About Matthew

Matthew Thorne was born in 1993 in Adelaide, South Australia. A landscape of asphalt roadways, neatly manicured colonialism, and industrial flats cut through sacred land.

Matthew’s work draws from the spiritual, surreal landscape of Australia and focuses on people, their relationship to their community, their land, their rituals, and their work.

Matthew is currently living and working between Berlin, Germany & Australia.

To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram

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The Sand That Ate The Sea

With his film and photographic project The Sand That Ate the Sea, Matthew Thorne tells the story of the land, community, and mysticism of the South Australian opal mining town Andamooka.

“These photos are a documentation of the community of Andamooka, of its dance with the grit and dreaming of Australia, and the curse of its colonial sins.”

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