The book connects two sites of particular familial significance in Greece, with Metaxas journeying between an olive grove bequeathed to her mother’s family in Palairos – where the ancient trees, each named after a woman in the maternal line, have stood sedately for five-hundred years – and Ithaca, the island where her father’s family originated, before migrating to Australia on a British steamship in 1901.

Drawing upon Metaxas’s multiple photographic languages, as well as her father’s Super-8 film stills – which he shot on his first and only trip to Greece in the late 1970s, travelling to Ithaca and Palairos with his wife and two daughters in tow – Mnemosyne Grove unfolds amidst an elegiac subtext. That Metaxas’s young father would tragically die during the same journey casts this work in the most poignant of lights – the artist retracing her father’s footsteps, in search of his family’s land and the olive trees that grow from its rugged contours. The symbol of the olive tree, and its branches, shifts in this context.

Though intensely personal, Metaxas’s work poses broader questions about our relationship to the land as a community, especially in the age of the Anthropocene.