Ewan Story

‘Victorialand’ is a series of oil paintings that explores the hubris and failed imperial ambition that sit beneath carefully maintained public façade of colonial success. 

Conceived as a fictional Victorian settlement in Antarctica, the city functions as a speculative site where imperial confidence and belief in empire begin to unravel. The project examines how colonial power sustains itself through myth, visibility, and narrative, and what remains when those myths are exposed to failure.

Rather than reconstructing history, the series uses invention to interrogate the psychology of empire. Each painting is organised around a limited viewpoint: the city is seen through the partial perception of a newly arrived child, Lily, in 1899. This perspective introduces distance and incompleteness. Lily’s gaze is attentive but unformed, and as a result, the series of paintings function as fragments of lived experience rather than illustrative scenes.

Works such as ‘Approach’ and ‘Taylor Harbour’ depict optimistic moments of arrival and settlement, where hope for a better future meets a forbidding, hostile landscape. ‘McMurdo Strand’ and ‘Lower Galley’ begin to strip away that theatre, revealing the human engine underneath: the workers, the displacement, the need and hunger that keeps the story moving. ‘Sacrifice’ does not soften this. It looks unflinchingly at the cost of empire, asking what must be surrendered to keep the myth intact, and who pays the price. Here the moral violence of the colonial project emerges through the uncloaking of ritual behind closed doors. Lives must bend – or break – to fit the story.

Painted slowly using traditional oil techniques, ‘Victorialand’ treats painting as a form of speculative world-building. The series holds imperial ambition in suspension, exposing how its myths persist even as their foundations crumble.