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Australian Horror One

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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 work reimagines Australian Gothic through 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. Flesh has not decayed; it has calcified into red Tanami clay, oxidized stone, and petrified khaki cotton. The intrusion of human technology—the corroded copper telegraph wire coiled into sinew, the thick glass insulators staring blindly as unblinking eyes—suggests a brutal, botched metamorphosis. It is 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 cross. Standing stranded on a melting hi...
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The infected touching antiquity

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Do you feel divinity when you touch antiquity? Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

The infected touching antiquity

Do you feel divinity when you touch antiquity?

Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

Stand before a marble relic, and you find yourself at the threshold of contact. The museum enforces detachment. Do you feel the decay and contamination your hands carry? But what happens when your flesh touches ancient stone?

To reach out is an act of somatic friction. Our mortal residue, sebaceous oils and living warmth, ruptures the sterile illusion of the untainted idol. We drag the pristine monument down into the mess of human mortality.

Yet, the instinct to touch is an innate longing for connection. Laying bare skin against ancient form collapses millennia, sparking a euphoric link to what came before. Touch restores, renews, and opens an otherworldly portal beyond everyday perception.

Touching antiquity infects its distant divinity with our decay, but in that very transgression, it bridges the void—granting the seeker genuine transport into transcendent awe.


Can martyrs decay? Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

Marks of decay

In the dim, eerie stillness of the red room, the illness first emerged. It passed through a simple touch, bringing with it a contagious chain of transmission that clung to the sacred vessel. In an instant, the boundary between the living and the inanimate dissolved; the disease no longer resided in warm blood but began to feed on the cold, ancient relic. Eventually, it moved into living tissue.

On the pale jawline, an ulcerated, tear-shaped lesion appeared. A festering crack formed, leaving corroded scars on our marble idols. In this dreadful convergence, our martyrs became the altar of disease and our ancient relics were embellished with marks of decay.

What does Prometheus mean to you? Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

I am a fragile organic machine

The eagle clocks in every morning, tearing me open.

A quiet parasite settling into the baseline, feeding on my psychological balance.

I stretch out a hand to touch the old relics.

Is this ache the agonising algorithm of forever?

Or just the breakdown of a fragile, organic machine?

Maybe my contamination.

The very grime the cultural institutions scrub away.

Is the only true proof I was ever here.


Do you feel it? Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

My burrowing parasite

My skin is seamless.

A frame of porcelain and poise.

I am guarded against decay.

I am well until death descends.


Then this architecture broke through.

And this crater bloomed. 

Tapping into a wet, arterial crimson vein.

This is my burrowing parasite.

Unmaking my calm equilibrium.


Do you feel shut away? Metamodernist art by JJFBbennett

Unmaking my calm equilibrium

It spreads along my cheekbone, radiating outward. My face has become an open altar, and I find myself shut away from the frantic world. Please do not ask me to be cured of this affliction.

My wild bloom of embers and arterial red branches from the bone like burning thorns, sprouting through my aging skin. My parasite has taken root, spreading its crown like a living dendritic flare of flame and leaf.


The sacred scar

The mark upon her cheek is no longer a fresh, suppurating lesion. It has healed into a sacred scar. The dendritic star radiates across the skin, serving as the permanent, physical record of a biological rupture. It proves that the human host is neither a closed, frictionless machine nor an untouchable ideal, but an open, vulnerable organism that has absorbed the impact of an encounter and survived.

Convinced that scars are theologically distinct from fresh wounds, she has endured her ordeal, integrated it, and transformed it into memory or meaning. A sign of divine devotion and sacrifice, not of weakness or failure, but of authenticity and spiritual ordeal. The inescapable somatic cost of being.


Then came the rupture

The marble held him locked in ancient stoicism. He as a monument to cold permanence, untouched by breath, pulse, or decay. He as an enduring tribute to purity, pure mineral frozen outside the reach of time.

From his pale cheek, the mineral fractured not into dust, but into life. A wet, glistening bloom. Pulsing with slow, rhythmic warmth, the scarlet anemone unfurled its delicate tentacles against the chiselled jaw, weeping dark crimson trails across his once polished surface.

Where there was once only eternal silence, something alien, sacred, and fiercely alive had chosen this cold effigy as its host. A living vessel once of grace now of torment.







John Bennett - AKA JJFBbennett, is an independent artist. You can view and subscribe to my work via Blogger, YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Instagram and Deviant Art. 

Subscribe to JJFBbennett's private FB hub: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/18ythpSXPZ/

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To support my art, feel free to donate via JJFBbennett through PayPal  



Copyright

This artwork is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws. Distribution and/or modification of the artwork without the written permission of the sponsor is prohibited.

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