JJFBbennett

Through the eyes of the Lost Soldier The sky is bleeding into the dirt again, and the old hunger crawls up through my boots. It no longer matters. Time does not march out here. It pools beneath a dry creek bed, stagnant and unseen. But when the moon swells, heavy and bruised with copper rust, the cold in my ribs becomes a scald. The scrub does not burn with heat. It burns with memory. Through the tangled mallee, I see the flash of artillery, the orange-red roar of a barrage that never stopped falling, trapped forever inside the rib cages of these dead gums. I taste copper on my tongue, sharp as rifle oil and dried blood. The black heavens press down, bending the whole world inward until I am trapped inside a glass bead of fire. I pace the boundary where red light cuts into deep shadow, waiting for a relief column that lost its heading eighty years ago. Everything here is parched. I am so thirsty. But I do not want water. I want your nourishment. I want your dawn, your warm pulse, as yo...

Blood Moon Scrub Have you seen the blood moon? Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett Under the blood moon, the vast stillness of the outback dissolves into something cosmic, suspended between dream and deep red fire. Rising through the enveloping dark, the blood moon did not simply sit in the sky; it swallowed the landscape whole, curving around the horizon like a living lens. Through its glowing, crimson ember core, the skeletal forms of ghost gums and twisted scrub took on the pulse of an ancient furnace. Vivid slashes of cadmium scarlet and molten gold flared against bruised greens, setting the silhouettes of the bush ablaze without a single breath of smoke. Around the periphery, the void creeps in, anchoring the fiery sphere to the quiet earth below, where cool tufts of spinifex melted into deep midnight shadows. It felt less like standing beneath the Southern Cross night and more like gazing through a tear in the terrestrial fabric; the ancient inland terrain breathi...

Australian Horror One The Lost Soldier to an Empire of Bone and Ash Under the unsparing glare of a white-hot sky, the horror does not lurk in the shadows—it bakes into the earth's surface itself. This image presents Australian Gothic Horror as a visceral, speculative dread, where the landscape is not merely hostile, but an active, devouring force that refuses to let the past rot in peace. The horror is elemental and corporeal: human history grafted directly into ancient geology. The Lost Soldier's flesh has not decayed; it has calcified into red earth, oxidized stone, and petrified khaki cotton. It has accepted the intrusion of human technology—corroded copper telegraph wire coiled into sinew, thick glass insulators staring blindly like unblinking eyes—suggesting a brutal, botched metamorphosis. It has become the physical manifestation of an unspoken colonial and wartime trauma, where the forgotten dead are subsumed, weaponized, and regurgitated by the country they sought to ta...

The Lights in the Deep Dark  Night Lights and the Peripheral Sentinel What do you see when driving at night? Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The night swallows the road long before the mind settles into the rhythm of the drive. Out here, where the bitumen cuts a narrow ribbon through the vast dark of the Australian bush , the headlamps carve out only the immediate seconds ahead—a tunnel of white glare against an ocean of shadow. Yet, vision at night is never truly confined to what sits directly in the beams. In the peripheral sweep, just beyond the hard edge of the headlights where the eucalyptus canopy dissolves into the black sky, the landscape breathes with another kind of presence. My Night Lights Are On Reflected softly on the wet glass of the side window, the world folds inward and outward at once. The rain-streaked pane catches the amber glow of the dashboard and smears it against the deep gloom outside, blurring the boundary between the cabin and the sc...

The Terminal Horizon Highway  The Terminal Horizon Tourist Bus Would you catch the Terminal Horizon bus? Travel sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The Long Highway Out here, the world ends not in silence, but in fire. The asphalt bleeds into cracked red earth, stretching toward a bruised horizon where the sky refuses to cool. Behind the glass, you drive chasing ghosts through a desert that forgot rain a lifetime ago. Beneath the Scorch Every road leads deeper into the furnace. Even below the surface, the rock fissures and weeps, hot steam rising through subterranean fractures where molten veins pulse in the dark, feeding an ancient, unforgiving heat. Broken Arteries What we built couldn’t hold. Rails twist into the dunes, swallowed by iron sand and wind. Bridges split down the seam, concrete splintered into raw bone, tangled rebar, and dying wires crackling into the smoke. The machines stopped; the wasteland stayed. The Last Horizon And when the road finally runs out, the...

From Adelaide River to Daly Waters Somewhere south of the Adelaide River "South of the Adelaide River" explores the haunting intersection of modern progress and forgotten history in the vast stretches of the Northern Territory. At the center of the composition stands the specter of a lone soldier, a poignant symbol of profound loss and of abandoned souls swallowed by the unforgiving outback. Stripped of a specific name, era, or mission, the figure represents all those left behind by the relentless march of time—individuals whose sacrifices and stories faded into the scrubland while the world simply moved on. The striking juxtaposition of this spectral wanderer beside a towering, contemporary road train underscores a profound sense of isolation. The heavy machinery of the modern world inches forward down the isolated track, entirely oblivious to the lingering ghosts of the past tethered to the roadside. The brilliant, atmospheric lighting that breaks through the forest canopy ...