A visual exploration of past, present, and future LGBTQI+ identity. A discussion about censorship, erasure, and acceptance among the context of the church institution and broader society.
Aftercare is a series of 10 photographic works exploring the emotional and psychological ideology behind selfcare and wellbeing. Created as a physical embodiment using myself and layers of pink bubble wrap, I enact these gestures through cocooning and containment, encasing the head and body of the figure. This covering alludes to fetishised notions of protection and care, replicating common tropes associated with actions based around aftercare as a period of recovery and healing, through not just a physical action, but including mental health based selfcare ideals in a society with a commercialised response to wellbeing. The interaction of identical multiple figures allude to the psychological paths and states of being, contained in the one person. These figures can be seen to be both helping and hindering each other as they role play actions of comfort and concern, making connections between mental health and the depictions of care and wellbeing.
Transcending bodies explores how sense-of-self and social dynamics are shaped in virtual environments. The exhibition brings into focus the possibilities and limits of existing online, untethered from the physical body. Through video, AI and printed photo-media, the artists challenge traditional and normative ideas of identity and envisions new forms of living in the virtual realm.
My work explores the physical forms that photographs can take, elevating each image to the treasured status of fine jewellery or exquisite sculpture. Its subject matter engages with the queer gaze, the body, and the experience of vulnerability, touch, and connection. I aim to use a mix of traditional darkroom and more experimental photographic and printing techniques to create a new and exciting body of work that incorporates polished metal plates, fine fabrics, glass, and mirrors. The substrate will be revealed through the ‘white’ areas in the images, leaving the black dots, reminiscent of a halftone screenprint, to create photographs in which the metal glows, the fabric shimmers, the glass disappears, or the mirror reflects the viewer back to themselves.
My work deals with migration, colonisation, language and place, mapping the territories (both internal and external) that chart belonging. After moving to Australia in 2019, and as migration became an increasingly tense subject in the face of the pandemic,I started considering more abstract ways to understand borders, identity and belonging, looking into the corrosive processes that we enforce on other humans.This interest has led me to research the overlapping nature between dark room photography and etching, both of which come into existence through timed exposures to corrosive agents.I intend to use the time provided at the residency to research this intersection, making the most of Photo Access’ infrastructure and liaison with Megalo, both of which offer valuable access to workshops that are no longer readily available or easily accessible elsewhere.
My proposed project, PERSPECTIVES, is an investigation into how to use photography to portray the many facets fo reality, much in the way the Cubist painters did. I will use handmade, analogue, pinhole cameras that will allow a greater number of view points to be recorded on a single photographic plane, than could ever be squeezed onto a digital sensor. I am interested in recording multiple perspectives of objects and concepts as an antithesis to digital media algorithms that so often show us the world from a narrow viewpoint, based on our own perspective.
In the summer of 1985 I set up a camera in a canvas booth at public events in Canberra and invited passers-by in to make photographs of themselves. The 400 images I collected that summer borrow from Richard Avedon’s large format studio portraits, but my purpose was not to make art. Instead, I was investigating the idea that something interesting might happen when I asked people “who are you?”, and made it possible for them to show me (and not just tell me) a story about themselves, in one photograph, at that moment in time.
Significantly, the project pre-dates the selfie by some decades. In contrast to the performative nature of that style of contemporary self-portraiture, the photographs collected by Picture Yourself are gentle, quirky, honest and straightforward depictions of a community and individuals not yet obsessed with self-image making, privacy and image ownership.