Photo series and ongoing projects
Pulvis // Dark Point, NSW, 2020
Dark Point is a site of Aboriginal Cultural Significance, having been a gathering place for the Worimi people for at least 4000 years. It is an eerie space. On the day I was here it was windswept and furiously noisy, unwelcoming to the point of hostility. And empty. The sense of being an intruder or an interruption inside the landscape was unmistakable. These images will complement a short story and should be available by the end of the year.
Domestic Shadows, 2020
Most of us spent a lot more time at home than we had previously been used to this year. Our experiences while vastly different among ourselves share certain observations. We have noticed subtler movements as our lives have become more confined. Introspection and an increased self awareness have grown as our everyday lives have undergone unprecedented levels of scrutiny. As many of our lifestyles have been abruptly made more sedentary, a frantic compensation through adjustment to working patterns, domestic balance and profound fear of invisible dangers has created a nervous energy which now occupies our uncanny domestic spaces. The age old sense of our homes as unhomely has been thrust to the forefront of our everyday experience. No longer confined to discussion of literary and cinematic themes, our homes have undergone a profound shift this year. From the neutral setting in which we rest and find relief to a constantly shifting space contested by each of the many components of our lives. This change from inert to reactive can be personified by the shadows that move across across our walls and seem to bring a change to the dimensions of our domestic space.
Bondi // May 2021
A row of figures. Commas on a noisy shoreline, we stood, grappling, hungry to contemplate the droplets as they fell.
Every liquid sphere becoming direction. Diffuse movement splintered into elemental parts. Each had a lens.
Our hopes were dissolved in the machines we held up and wore around us. Tiny dark cells hoping to fix, to count one frame. Smiles among strangers, shared silence amidst the roar- each of us across from that magnitude was granted a melting fragment to absorb and to transmit, amplifying by looking, by being changed.
Every person who passed stopped for a moment and whether their thoughts were of the velvet foam and mermaid’s souls or the density of actions or lack thereof, there was gratitude that in casting out short-lived conceptions, something so catastrophic could draw in a moment of clarity. Moments, gleanings of light matter rising to the surface, pushed against the rock, then sinking out of reach into our deepest solitude. Before us and around us and unceasing. It was enough to overwhelm each of us, fix us for a moment. A shattering, crystallized dance crashed against our senses, for a moment we saw that we were standing witness. There seemed to be no answer, we were unequal even to the question.
Then glancing along that wave, seeing the figure playing like a shadow across a great tangled mass. Skating across a tipping point that we’d taken for a flicker. Not a place, but only a glint. So exacting in form as to be more an idea than a person. An interruption as much as silence, as much as drawing breath. In that moment, on that crest we saw him triumph against that unceasing pull.
Trying to stand still for 5 seconds, 2019
So much of parenting feels like a tension between pushing forward, developing, improving, helping your child to grow and simultaneously mourning the speed at which they change and memories get away from us. We rely on photographs to guard these moments but even as we watch the shutter close, we can’t shake the unmistakable feeling of something moving past us.
This series began during the clean up after a birthday party.
Everything had gone well, memories made, gifts received. Afterwards several shiny glistening helium balloons were crackling across the ceiling of my kitchen, slowly deflating and moving like tired stay-behind guests. The helium has started to leak out, the silvery moon shape is still hovering like a happy nuisance. I couldn’t bring myself to pop them so they stayed neither buoyant nor sinking for several days. So hardly did we acknowledge them by the third day that they seem to be in every room all at once. Anticipating our brushes with them and moving, but slowly, fearfully away, only now and again dashing towards a space of colder air. My son attacked them cheerfully. We brushed them away from the cooker impatiently.
Their lingering; mildly annoying, amusing; seemed to stand in for all of the micro tensions that pervaded the weekend.
“No, don’t eat all of the biscuits before your friends get here” “Give me a minute” “Can you just stand still for a second!” “Not yet”
Those parts which we wished we could erase; knew that probably would soon be erased by the overall happiness of the celebration, but which for now lived amongst us not ready to be dismissed.
Sometimes when it’s quiet we realise how impossible it is, how unreasonable to ask so new a human being to stand still when everything around them is moving and buzzing and vibrating with expectation. But when we are not still and quiet ourselves we ask anyway and risk so many fragile moments when we don’t see one another clearly.
Hem, 2017/16
: A garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded narrowly and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric.
: To surround something or someone in a confining way.
Sacrifice and containment. Almost every article of clothing we will ever wear will have these small, almost unnoticeable strips of fabric. They are ceded by the garments that don’t merely occupy our lives but frequently colour our interactions and steer us towards or away from our intentions. The hem is a boundary. A demarcation. A ubiquitous practise of sacrificing at the edges, that which is understood to be endangered.
I wore these clothes in a domestic setting and presented these partial self-portraits in double exposures hoping to show the way in which these hemlines perform an entanglement. Flowering trees and landscaped pathways prettify, characterise and contain our urban environment all at once. In these images the colourful shoots and buds menace the sitter. They invite the viewer to employ a narrative of the unkempt vs. the pristine or the personal vs. the hidden, to characterise and perhaps query the integrity of the subject. Alone, in an environment of self-containment, the suggestion of that which is outside still encroaches upon the individual and determines the negotiable space between ourselves and others.
