Recorded over five years, Spirits presents a series of intimate wildlife self-portraits. These charming works, created with a motion-sensor camera positioned near a dam, reveal the habits, pleasures and dangers of the locals’ lives. Spirits creates a story about the tenuous existence of native animals on this continent, and by extension, our own fragility.
Siciliano presents a series of works arising from playful collaborations with photographic materiality, non-human organisms and natural forces. Fungal networks grow through 35mm negatives documenting landscapes, while moisture softens and encourages the film emulsion to peel. Images emerge at the meeting point of growth and decomposition.
Combining photography, drawing, animation, sound and projection, Poisonous investigates the microscopic world of our waterways – a realm invisible to our eyes and critical to our survival. Hutch navigates the complexities of the ‘health’ of our waterways and looks with awe and wonder at the molecular structure of minerals and microbes that are both toxic poisons and useful contributors to the ecosystem.
In PhotoAccess’ annual Members’ showcase, a diverse community of artists and photographers come together to explore the idea of the ‘wild blue yonder’ – evoking endless horizons, soaring escape and the joy of adventure into parts unknown.
Across the ages, blue has been used when visualising something from our imagination, out of reach or the divine. As a pigment, blue is extremely rare in nature, despite being found in the environment around us – from the tranquil light blue of sky to the melancholy deep blue of the ocean. Unlike certain reds, browns, and yellows, blue pigment cannot be created from materials within our grasp. Blue represents an entirely new world beyond our own.
Emerging from a period of restricted movement, these works explore beyond our immediate surrounds and dive into the ‘wild blue yonder’.
Presenting a self-portrait of her life as a flight attendant, Grant takes inspiration from the aerial viewpoint and restricted perspectives offered through her ‘office’ window. Vignettes framed by the plane’s portholes form abstracted landscapes, printed in cyanotype onto paper ephemera the artist collected during her in-flight duties. Composited to form large-scale panoramas, these views produce skies filled with navigational charts to and from different destinations around Australia.
An immersive video installation, Sky Eternal mirrors moving cloudscapes to create a kind of moving Rorschach inkblot. Accompanied by an ambient soundscape, this mesmerising work mediates on the ways in which the universal and timeless sky unites us all, a metaphor for innovation, positivity, hope and heaven.
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.
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.