Codes of Survival text - a series of combination Photographs/photograms on the Subantarctic Islands of New Zealand - 1993 - © Lloyd Godman

"In the early 1990s Lloyd's work explored the complex mix of creative adoption and destructiveness involved in the human participations with the ecosystem. Codes of Survival ( 1989 - 92), the result of a journey to the Auckland Islands, is a sequence that surrounds photographs of the pristine sub-antarctic land and seascapes with photograms of the human-made detritus that has washed up there. These objects, many of them tools, are "pollution", but they are also evidence of human attempts to survive in this harsh environment. As Linda Tyler commented, the images paradoxically "register the inscriptions of culture upon nature, while alluding to the chthonian ( natural ) realm, which is beyond our possession".

Lawrence Jone Artlink Vol 25 - no4