Fort Lytton is a paradox in many ways: a site of protection and exclusion, past and present, action and obsolescence. Built in 1881 as Brisbane’s first line of naval defence, it was never called to war. Its artillery never fired, its moat never breached, and its submarine mines remained inert. Yet even in disuse, it persists – an empty ark guarding nothing but its own past.

Boundary making is never neutral. To fortify is to delineate power, to declare belonging and otherness, and to reinforce control. The architecture of the fort continues to speak of colonial anxieties, exclusionary geographies, and the boundaries that shape not only our spaces, but identities. At the edge of the Brisbane River, straddling land and water, Fort Lytton is a liminal threshold in every sense. This exhibition  seeks to reveal that all borders, physical or ideological, are subject to erosion.

A Narrow Strip Along a Steep Edge invites eight contemporary artists to find possibilities of transformation in Fort Lytton’s lingering structures. Their works engage with the instability of  boundaries – between nature and culture, self and other, active and obsolete.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of thresholds. Beginning in Casemate One, the human and machine become entangled where the line between operator and instrument begins to dissolve. In Casemate Two, the focus shifts inward to the liminal margins of the psyche, where fear and reckoning blur distinctions between real and imagined. The installations occupying the Outside spaces deconstruct colonial and military apparatus, their ghostly disuse revealing the cultural and semiotic permeability permitted in the afterlife of power. The exhibition culminates in the Engine Room, reimagined as a speculative cabinet of curiosities, referencing the origins of the museum in the 16th century when collections sought to classify the taxonomically anomalous. Here, hybrid anatomies probe the porous borders of the body, the other, and the posthuman unknown.

In reactivating Fort Lytton, A Narrow Strip Along a Steep Edge does not seek to erase its histories, but rather expose the instability of their edges. In the fluidity of borderlands, new narratives begin to take form.

The Creative Sparks Grant Program is an initiative of Brisbane City Council in partnership with the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

— Holly Eddington