Roger Palmer, Botany Bay. Courtesy the artist

Colonialism, migration, maritime trade and their place in the history of Leeds are the subject of the current exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery.

The show, Botany Bay, running until August 12 2007, features the work of Roger Palmer, who is primarily concerned with how representations of landscape are related to colonial discourse.

On display in the exhibition are traditional film photography, digital video works and a neon sculpture, with recurring motifs of canals, waterways, bridges and working vessels.

A large neon wall sculpture, ‘The Remains’, recalls a link between the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the site of the first colonial and penal settlement in Australia. Botany Bay was so called because Captain James Cook was accompanied by botanist Sir Joseph Banks on his 1770 voyage to the country, who brought back an enormous number of plants from his forays in the new land.

Botany Bay was also the name given to the canal in Leeds, as it was the point where the first imports of Australian wool arrived in the city for the nearby mills.

Königsberg is another work that connects geographically distant places through their names. The piece consists of photographs of Tanzania and Russia, referencing historical events.

Roger Palmer, still from ‘The Remains of a Wooden Icebreaker lie submerged in Botany Bay’, 2007 (DVD). Courtesy the artist

Viewers are invited to unravel topographic, climatic and cultural information in nine black and white photographs taken in Colombia, Egypt, Jamaica, Namibia, Panama, Scotland and the United States, which depict unremarkable moments.

Meanwhile, an image made close to the Suez Canal hangs close to two images of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, which dissolve into each other and also an 1893 painting of the canal (Knostrup Cut, Leeds, Sunday Night by John Atkinson Grimshaw).

In another gallery is a DVD projection of still photographs entitled Caledonia, accompanied by a soundtrack. The projection recalls a 17th century attempt to establish a Scottish colony between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in present-day Panama. The Scottish voyagers planned to establish a lucrative trade route, but the venture ended in failure with considerable loss of life and shipping.

Between 2004 and 2006, Palmer wrote the word Caledonia in herbs and spices on beaches in Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Scotland and the USA, symbolising the goods that might have been traded by the ships. The photographs show the word being eroded by the sea.

A programme of events, Trading Spaces, accompanies the exhibition. See the Gallery’s listings for more information.