She Was Encoded in the Night
Introducing The Encoded — ten critically endangered Australian species, ten women, and the question the natural world has been asking for longer than we have been alive to hear it
She carries something that arrived in the night. She did not ask for it. She does not yet know — not fully, not in language — what it is asking of her.
The marks on her face appeared while she slept. They are not tattoos, not paint, not the residue of a dream she will forget by morning. They are the encoding of a creature — a specific creature, in a specific place, in a specific and urgent ecological situation — written onto her face by something that needed a face. Something that has been trying to be seen for a very long time. Something that chose this moment, and this face, because other methods have not been working.
In the last two posts I asked a question and then left it open. In The Code Beneath the Skin I wrote about the intelligence we have been ignoring while we race to build artificial ones. In The Body Was Always a Page I wrote about marks not human in origin, about the face carrying the condition of something that has no face of its own and needs one. I asked you to look at the face in that image and ask yourself who wrote it.
This is the answer. And this is the beginning of what I have spent the past year building toward.
The natural world is not sending data. It is not publishing reports. It has encoded itself onto the faces of ten young women and is asking them — and us — to pay attention in a different way entirely.
Let me introduce you to The Encoded. It is both a fine art photography series and a book in three parts. Ten critically endangered Australian species. Ten women who carry their markings overnight. The Lord Howe Island Phasmid, believed extinct for eighty years before twenty-four survivors were found on a sea stack in the Tasman Ocean. The Mary River Turtle, who takes thirty years to be ready and grows algae on her head like a living crown. The Bathurst Copper Butterfly, managing a three-way ecological relationship for three million years. The Golden Sun Moth, spending twenty-five years underground before emerging with no mouth. Ten creatures. Ten forms of intelligence the world is in the process of losing while we direct our wonder elsewhere.
The images are made exclusively with high end Leica cameras and Profoto lighting. The encodings are realised through creature-specific makeup and large-format photographic overpainting in the tradition of Gerhard Richter — the photograph as ground for a painted surface, the two registers inseparable in the final work. The prints are 1500 by 1500 millimetres on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta. At that scale they are not images you walk past. They are presences.
The book is in three parts: firstly, a complete 200-page found-document novel, secondly, 120 images, and thirdly, 10 pages of ecological nonfiction. It’s not a photobook with literary accompaniment. It’s not a novel with photographs. It’s a single argument made in three registers — fictional, visual, scientific — about what intelligence is, what we are losing, and what it would mean to pay attention before the losing is complete.
The woman in this image carries the Lord Howe Island Phasmid. She does not yet know everything the encoding is asking of her. Neither do I, not in full. But I know what it has asked of the past year — the shoots, the overpainting that is beginning, the novel that has been written alongside the images, the ecological research that has changed how I understand every creature in the series. It has asked for the kind of attention you give to something when you understand that it might not be there much longer.
That quality of attention is what The Encoded is made of. And it is what I am asking for in return.
:: Rand
THE ENCODED - CAMPAIGN COMING LATE 2026
The project launches on Kickstarter later this year. The pre-launch page is live now - register to be notified the moment the campaign opens. The full project website is also live now.