PHOTOGRAPHY
A brief history of photo making:
Photography has always felt the most accessible and immediate of art forms to me.
Over the decades, I have attempted to capture that which is fleeting and transitory by nature - reflections in rainwater, the play of light and shadow as the sun moves across the sky - changing rapidly from one moment to the next; hands full of petals, light streaming through branches, my own image reflected - ephemeral and mutable; and the dance of the seasons, of the planets, of the aeons - all filtering through the camera lens and human eye as the psyche searches for patterns, for symbols,
….gleaning the beauty of nature and wonder at Life on Earth.
I reach for my camera, as the muse takes me, recording that which would otherwise be lost to ephemera.
Many moons ago, when it was all silver paper and darkrooms and analogue techniques, I studied photography as part of a Visual Arts qualification. I was much in love with Francesca Woodman, Christian Boltanski, Hannah Hoch, Barbara Kruger, "cut-up" artforms and experimentation and antique techniques such as photograms, daguerreotypes, cyanotypes and artists like Julia Margaret Cameron. Over the years, I have captured hundreds of thousands of images - both analogue and digital - using polaroid cameras, digital and analogue SLRs, “point and shoots”, phones and disposables.
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Sepia Angel from my Angel series, 1996.
Photomontage.
Silver Photograph with hand-painted shellac on old leather book cover. Analogue Photograph.
Blue Angel from my Angel series, 1996.
Hand-painted photograph.
Silver photograph with acrylic paint and ink on salvaged masonite. Analogue Photograph.
For me, spontaneity is the golden key; since graduating, the images I capture are rarely staged or contrived.
Moon Room, The Dream House series, 2022.
Digital Photograph
This is a current body of work in progress.
I often use photographs as reference for my drawn and painted works, that is how this series began - as reference for a mixed-media piece. Inspired by the work of Jan Švankmajer.
The art of taking photos has played a significant part, not only as a tool but as a medium, emanating through my art praxis.
As a young woman, I dreamt of becoming a Photo Journalist and travelling to wilder places - in search of truth. That spirit spurs me on in my existential pursuit of beauty and spiritual exploration of duality. I loved National Geographic Magazines as a child and had an extensive collection once dating back decades that I would scour in search of knowledge and inspiration.
I have a fondness for portraiture and documentary photography and appreciate the work of photographers such as Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Dorothe Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Robert Doisneau, Robert Mapplethorpe (particularly his altars, Erwin Blumenfeld, the film work of Ana Mendieta and Earth art by Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, the fantastical theatrical works of Tim Walker and contemporary artist Brooke Shaden, Agnieszka Motyka and Caryn Drexl, and fashion photographers such as Wendy Bevan and Ellen Rogers.
Ariel Gray (or, Portrait of my child sleeping). 2014-2016
Ari, reference image, support for a series of Picasso-esque sketches.
Often, the photographs I take are also used as reference, or originally posed to act as reference images, for other artworks such as paintings and mixed-media, or incorporated into digital works such as my Mandala series or used to generate gifs.
An exploration of blood, ritual and fertility - the photograph depicted plants from my garden, the Birthflower used my series of mandala photographs ‘Transcendence’ as a reference point. It was painted in menstrual blood.
It was the thirst of many years restrained in our body.
Chained words which we could not say except on the lips of dreams. Everything was surrounded by the green miracle of the landscape of your body. Upon your form, the lashes of the flowers responded to my touch, the murmur of streams. There was all manner of fruits in the juice of your lips, the blood of the pomegranate, the horizon of the mammee and the purified pineapple. I pressed you against my breast and the prodigy of your form penetrated all my blood through the tips of my fingers. Smell of oak essence, memories of walnut, green breath of ash tree. Horizon and landscapes = I traced them with a kiss. Oblivion of words will form the exact language for understanding the glances of our closed eyes. = You are here, intangible and you are all the universe which I shape into the space of my room. Your absence springs trembling in the ticking of the clock, in the pulse of light; you breathe through the mirror. From you to my hands, I caress your entire body, and I am with you for a minute and I am with myself for a moment. And my blood is the miracle which runs in the vessels of the air from my heart to yours.
Frida Kahlo, from a letter to Diego Rivera
Transcendence series (also known as mandalas): 2017-2020
manipulated digital/ analogue photographs or artworks
Spring in Australia/ Autumn in The People’s Rebublic of China
The mandala image below was sort of the starting point for my experiments with the mandala as an artform.
I was invited on a study tour to The People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong. Such a lovely adventure. The photograph below was taken on our walk through the Westlake gardens, during our five day stay in Fuzhou. I played around with Adobe Photoshop and several platforms, apps and digital tools to manipulate and distort the original photograph.
I wish we'd been a bit more slow paced, I wanted to spend more time looking at the trees and flowers, such pretty leaves and branches - different Melbourne. I just really liked looking at this artwork. It's a lovely thing to reflect upon.
I love lying under trees, staring up through the branches.
And the branches seemed so magical in this other part of the world…
I really wanted to capture that ‘Sense of Wonder’ as Rachel Carson put it.
Joseph Campell on Following Your Bliss
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
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[Sacred space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
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Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
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Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.
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But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I know it, I have seen it happen in students.
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I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.
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The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.
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If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
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The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way… Life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure.
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There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.
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– Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Selected digital photographic work: 2008-current
Selected Photographic Series
Self. 2015-current
Covid Portraits 2020-current
Robbie.
Ariel Gray.
Anna.
Life on Earth. 2012-2015
A spy in the house of love. 2017
Ben and Ari
Child. 2008-2015
And I watched as he danced with his shadow. 2008
