Perimeter x Liss Fenwick | Naarm / Melbourne Book Launch
Join us at Perimeter Books for the long-awaited celebration for The Colony, the second photobook from artist Liss Fenwick and their first for Perimeter Editions! The official Naarm / Melbourne launch takes place in store on Saturday July 11, 4pm–6pm, and will feature Liss Fenwick and Mikala Dwyer in conversation, followed by a signing and casual celebration with light refreshments.
We look forward to seeing you there!
EVENT DETAILS
Perimeter Books
734 High St, Thornbury VIC
Saturday July 11, 2026
4pm–6pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
Please note that while children are welcome in the space, we are unfortunately unable to offer a 'kid-friendly' zone where kids can entertain themselves, and we require close supervision by parents or guardians while in the store.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Liss Fenwick’s The Colony is a book about books – and what happens when their authority is quietly and actively undone. Set in the distant north of the Australian continent, The Colony – Fenwick’s first photobook with Perimeter Editions – reflects on the book as a dominant form of human knowledge, and its role in a long, often destructive relationship with other forms of intelligence and history.
Made on Larrakia and Wulna Country, the project sees Fenwick return to the region depicted in their acclaimed debut book Humpty Doom (Bad News Books, 2023), which was photographed around the artist’s hometown of Humpty Doo, Northern Territory, where they grew up on unceded land in a settler family. But where Humpty Doom swayed closer to the documentary genre, here Fenwick shifts positions, enlisting an unlikely team of co-authors – a termite colony living beneath their childhood home. Gathering books inherited from schoolrooms and family shelves – texts steeped in frontier myths, one-sided histories, and the erasure of First Nations cultures – Fenwick fed the selection of colonial volumes to the termites and then photographed the remains: a dense, sculptural language of tunnels, voids, and clay scaffolds.
Using photography as both witness and collaborator, Fenwick allows collapse and digestion to reshape the dominant narrative, reversing these books’ presumed authority. The termites’ act of destruction becomes a generative act, dismantling certainty and returning knowledge to the soil, altered and unfinished. Woven amongst the pages of The Colony are photographs of colossal termite mounds, which appear as ancient, ghostly, monoliths piercing the landscape – their immense forms giving little indication of the assiduous, living commune within.
Fenwick’s photographs give precedence to native ecology and organic process over the hierarchy of structure and control; an active unlearning of the settler mindset that remains deeply entangled in contemporary Australia. In this book, the colonial fantasy is eaten away, hollowed out from within.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
LISS FENWICK is an artist working across photography, video, sound and material processes. Born in Australia on Larrakia Country, they work between Larrakia Country, Northern Territory, and Naarm, Victoria. Their practice explores relationships between land, extraction and settler culture, often looking to the more-than-human world for humour, tenderness and joy. Fenwick has exhibited widely, including in On Country: Photography from Australia at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, and is the recipient of the Macquarie Emerging Artist Prize and the Fineman Award for New Photography.
In works that explore how we relate to the object-world, MIKALA DWYER has pushed the limits of sculpture, painting and performance, establishing herself as one of Australia's most important contemporary artists. She has been honoured with solo survey exhibitions at Sydney's two major art museums, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Alongside numerous international exhibitions, her work has been selected for the Istanbul Biennale (1995), the Biennale of Sydney (2010 and 2014) and the Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Australian Art (2010 and 2020). Dwyer is also a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne.