Contemporary image making practice. Fluid input.
Dublin, South Australia @artgalleryofnsw #myaustraliais
#central #australia#dreaming the #moment of #red#ulurukatatjutanationalpark#nofilterneeded
#central #australia#dreaming the #moment of #red#ulurukatatjutanationalpark#nofilterneeded
Is a homage to unexpected death.
These images capture the paths of many people, memorialised in totems of reminders placed on road side crash scenes.
My Highway of Death, are the roads between Adelaide and Victor Harbour in South Australia.
Developed as a response to my mother's death, not through a car accident, yet through the accident of cancer.
These deaths represent one of a myriad of accidents in the process of life's journey. The images reflect on the anonymity of life, on how quickly it can all pass by.
2008
Lost amongst the crucifixes of surrounding Stobie poles, rooted incongruously in its location, the churches, the halls, all focus of the series, City of Churches.
Recording these symbols of belief, these edifices, innately lacking the grandeur that is typically associated with religious architecture, has bordered on obsession.
Flaunting the flâneur’s fascination towards a detached but aesthetically attuned observation, this series becomes a small typology for the congregations of South Australia.
It is with the gaze from Ned Kelly’s helmet that I began to look at his landscape. A narrow slit — his self imposed panavision.
This vision is then immersed & melded with the perspective of an aboriginal dreamscape — most specifically from the Yarralin Tribe — from far north-western Australia.
It is the duality of Australian myth & the Yarralin Aborigines, the inclusion of the figure of Ned Kelly within both cultures which has resulted in these images.
Ned Kelly represents one of the few inclusive links of white Australia to Aboriginal dreaming.
“In the farthest corner of the continent from Kelly country the Yarralin people of north-western Australia have taken Ned Kelly into their dreaming. They tell how when salt water covered the land Ned Kelly and his angel friends came in a boat, made a river and caused the salt water to retreat.
Another story relates that he came to Wave River Station and taught the Aborigines there how to make tea and damper, that ‘although there was only one billy of tea and one little damper, everybody was fed.’ This Dreamtime figure who evokes Jesus, Noah and Moses is also present in the age of European settlement.
According to another Yarralin story, he kills four policemen at Wyndham and Captain Cook takes him back to England. There Ned’s throat is cut and he is buried. The Sky darkens, there is a sound like thunder and Ned Kelly rises up into the sky. White men are rigid with fear and distant Darwin buildings tremble.”
“ After all, if everything is a record of itself, then what is the difference between the physical thing and a perfectly accurate simulation of it?"
These images investigates the intersection of realities. Grounded in the photographic process as exemplified in, The Re-Photographic Survey, by Mark Klett & Associates in the mid seventies. The re-photographing of "real" locations gives a new vision of past, present & the intersections that became apparent through time.
This project interrogates the relationships between virtual reality/reality, and what makes compelling viewing to contemporary audiences.
By conjoining known “real” landscapes with an archive of known “real” landscapes gleaned from the archives of NASA & images I have taken in museums.
“.. To think virtuality is to think reality differently.”
These images are essentially extending my practice of photographic skills through self-expression and experimentation.
Most people just want to take a balanced, colourful and sharp picture. They are happy to use their camera's to make records of their family milestones, holidays and personal achievements.
These images strive to develop a deeper, more intense relationship with the media of photography. Very much as a painter strives for better understanding of their paint, canvas, brushes and subject, these experimental photographs desire an emotional companionship of image and viewer.
The "beautiful" image, this mode of representation, which is purposive for itself, and which, although devoid of (definite) purpose, furthers the culture of mental powers in reference to social communication.
“Things of Stone & Wood” is a continuation of my fascination with the impermanence of my existence as a flaneur in this life.
Many more collections to follow. The depth of each series will be revealed as I catch up.
Apologies the site had been hacked - so now a whole new adventure in sharing my wealth of practice is slowly being uploaded.
