One fine day in April this year, an odd scene unfolded on the dry claypan beneath the cliffs of Rainbow Valley, south of Alice Springs. It involved two people: one, a teenage girl, was holding a white reflector, angling it to bounce the desert light onto the other, a middle-aged woman in a ’70s safari suit, who was jumping in the air while a camera on a tripod nearby clicked away automatically. If you’d witnessed this scene, you might have wondered what on earth was going on. The answer: they were making a work of art about death…

By Ross Bilton