Interview by Mauricio Rivera

“Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” - Virginia Woolf

This series of images is a meditative journey through life and loss. It is the story of my family surrounded by the beauty of the natural world and the shadows that are always present.

The story of Solitary Bird begins twelve years ago when two life-changing events happened in a short space of time. In July 2004 my husband took his own life, a few months later my youngest child Oaka was born. This continuing work is an abstract look at being in an absurd world and finding one’s happiness.

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•  1 July 2016  •  View comments

Christine McFetridge, from The Winter Garden, 2015

CHRISTINE MCFETRIDGE: I’m finding it quite strange anticipating this conversation, mostly because we’re taking something quite private into a public space. I’m feeling a bit self-conscious! I’d like to begin by talking about process - because it’s something we’ve only really just begun to discuss and pick apart (which I think is probably a result of our shared residency in Wyndham Vale). Could you talk about a photograph of yours that is significant to you? One that perhaps represents something of a eureka moment?

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•  15 June 2016  •  View comments

I went to the U.S. in search of the America I knew from watching films and TV as a child. What I found, in the wastelands of Nevada, was something far more striking.

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•  1 June 2016  •  View comments

My work is characterised by an investigation into the visual rupture or aberration. Utilising collage, photography, video and performance, I am interested in the idea that image rupture can enable an exploration of the discrepancies that exist in any image we see or perceive.

My performance practice, which features here, explores a temporal engagement with the charged atmosphere of urban fringe landscapes and the body in relation to industrial architecture. Figures irresolutely traverse, moving in and out of an ordered architectural frame or signal and gesture with reflective objects. At times, the body exists in strange suspension, a moment of rupture to the surrounding landscape. Although stark and seemingly unremarkable, the half-built office blocks, truck stop cafes and vacant weed-filled lots that form the outskirts of urban development are yet charged with a sense of the otherworldly. The actions performed attempt to connect with the presence of an energy that I find in certain locations, something that is felt but not seen; a landscape that is familiar yet distant. I try to filter the occurrence of strange tensions and psychological resonances experienced in these sites through the mediums of video and photography.

The nature of video recording is precise enough to show things as they are, yet also enables a way of using reality to describe what is possibly unreal. The moving image, in particular, has allowed a compelling and unquiet impression of the places performed in. I have most recently been developing a new series of video works, one of which I have included an extract of here. It has a companion piece utilising mirrors that occurs in the same location; the two videos are designed to be displayed together.

Double Signal, performance documentation, digital photograph, 2016

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•  15 May 2016  •  View comments

In the 1980s, the late drug-lord Pablo Escobar built a zoo in his favourite property: the “Hacienda Napoles” (Naples Estate), located in the mid-Magdalena region, some 320 Km north-west from Bogotá. The zoo was the largest and most diverse in Latin America. It had giraffes, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lions, elephants, tigers, antelopes, camels, kangaroos, bisons, red-haired cows from Ireland, hundred-year-old turtles from the Galapagos Islands and a wide range of wild birds; in total, 1900 animals living in a luscious tropical land, in the closest to natural conditions.

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•  2 May 2016  •  View comments

Edited by Mauricio Rivera

Prologue

Tanglin Halt: a quaint little area in Singapore. It is perhaps famous for its fried dough sticks (or maybe for nothing at all). Houses were simple, every block had about ten storeys and on each floor, eight to ten apartments.

It was the typical layout of what we call ‘HDB Flats’, houses built by the government and sold to Singaporean families at low prices. After all, land in Singapore is scarce, which often meant that private housing was a luxury.

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•  14 April 2016  •  View comments

Interview by Christine McFetridge

Cities in New Zealand are at the mercy of the land upon which they are built. The references in your photographs to temporality; construction sites and shipping containers, and singular people moving through space, make me think about the simultaneous period of change in Christchurch as a result of the earthquakes. There’s even a visual reference to the Westpac Rescue Helicopter service. Auckland’s waterfront is built on reclaimed land and surrounded by dormant volcanoes. To what extent does the fraught relationship we have with nature inform the series?

When I started the work I was attracted to the idea of photographing the CBD and waterfront of Auckland, a city which is the site of much of New Zealand’s wealth and power. The city seems to be re-inventing itself rapidly in the 21st Century. I imagined the work would be about newness. But as I’ve progressed I’ve been startled to find traces of a much older Auckland – buildings and walls and fugitive little windows and businesses. I’ve come to think of the place almost as an archaeological site which is having its soil rapidly turned over.

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•  1 April 2016  •  View comments

An invitation to be a witness at a wedding means accepting my role as conscious voyeur, carrying an implicit obligation to capture their performance and their obligation to perform. It’s often an uncomfortable reminder of how poor my photography is, as I have always sought to make photographs of the invisible, the unnoticed, the unperformed. I prefer spaces and the environment to the people in it, mainly for failing to understand the people in it, or how to photograph them.

So I accept and participate as a voyeur, as a sanctioned observer, taking permission to cut through the choreography and ceremony, to find some small moments where the lights have been lowered and the performers prepare their next scene. Quietly alone, or with a thousand eyes upon them, the weight of generations on their shoulders. Fragile in their silk and brocade. To find each by themselves, alone for the last time. Reaching out for someone to hold on to. These real moments happen in the intermission, and to find them, bear witness to them, is worth a thousand performances.

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•  15 March 2016  •  View comments

Interview by Dan Sibley

I use photography as a medium to explore my psychological unknown, as well as my reality and environment. I prefer to expose the unseen. The lens allows me to capture and bind the scattered fragmentation of memory and time to produce palpable, even ambiguous, pictures. The most important part of my creative process is to explore and experiment with the photograph as a document, then analyse the visual layers and narratives.

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•  3 March 2016  •  1 note  •  View comments

A photograph can only describe what a camera sees, yet the photographer controls where the camera will look. On the surface, I can construct a pleasing composition, beneath the surface I have no control as to what may really be occurring. Using the camera as a tool for simple observation facades are dissolved, secrets revealed and new meanings are found.

The Beyond The Plaza series is a collection of images taken during a number of street walks around Penrith Plaza in Sydney’s Western Suburbs. It is a reaction to the contrast that exists between hyper-realities of shopping malls and the actualities of the streets which surround them.

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•  16 February 2016  •  View comments

These works were shown as part of my recent exhibition Open Your Mind - Tread Softly. These works depict trail flags and mountain views along a walking track on Hrisey, a tiny island in Northern Iceland. At its core, photography, for me, is about collecting sites, with each photograph becoming a souvenir from your life. These trail flags loosely marked out a path across the island and provided the only evidence of human existence as far as the eye could see in almost every direction. To me, they suggest the futility of trying to work against nature and yet maintain a cheerful encouragement to continue on the path and absorb the invigorating views. These images are part of a larger body of work that takes its title from a sign at the start of the trail that invites the walker to experience the life force of the island and feel the natural energy radiating from the ancient mountains surrounding the island.

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•  1 February 2016  •  View comments

Monuments is a photographic series which utilises historical image making structures to comment on domestic life in contemporary Australia. Through the use of formal portraiture, the images explore Archetypes of Australian culture. Using native flowers and modern Australian food, the supplementing images utilise the still life to explore Australia’s relationship with both it’s native environment and westernised iconography.

Claire after a shower

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•  14 January 2016  •  1 note  •  View comments

Remote and regional areas of Australia invite a particular kind of reverie and imagining in the lone photographer. For this wanderer, scenes from a film that doesn’t exist or memories that are simply fictions emanate from the land and the home. The home protects and provides solace from the evocations and hauntings of the landscape. To contemplate fleeting perceptions and visions from the exteriors, I have retreated back inside.

Special thanks to Dianne Dickson.

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•  1 January 2016  •  View comments

The long road from Wellington to Taupo, on the north island of New Zealand, passes through a succession of fantastic landscapes: the wild coast from Porirua to Paekakariki, the eerie Rangipo Desert north of Waiouru, the sharp peaks of Tongariro National Park. The day my mother and I set out on this drive from Wellington begins sunny and warm, but so windy that in the small, seemingly empty town of Foxton—the last stop before State Highway 1 leaves the coast and curves inland—we have to abandon our attempt to eat lunch outside and retreat to the safety of the car. By the time we climb out to stretch our legs, somewhere between Mangaweka and Turangi, large black storm clouds have gathered, though directly above us the sun is still out. This is what gives the light in this photograph its peculiar quality.

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•  2 December 2015  •  View comments

Alongside Ray K Metzker’s composites and Edward Steichen’s textile design photography, it’s Instagram - the scroll of the archive grid, the shifts of focus from the macro to the micro to the meta - that inspire this series of      

FUMBLED MACROSFINITE MICROS,
WORDS AND LETTERS
IN PATTERNED PERPETUITY,
COMPOSED;
WITH A CAMERA

Aesthetically, this series is an exploration of formalism through playful symmetries, contrasts and rhythms of geometry and colour. Conceptually, I’m interested in the overhauling of signs and signals - busy, bouncing and boisterous - and how this release and remix from context converges with abstraction and photography.

These ornamental patterns represent a continued pursuit of motifs that have grown from a quest to write with a camera, alongside continued theoretical interests in letters, typography, semiotics, publishing and urban poetics.

TROTTING STEPS,
DAPPLED LUMINOSITY -
WHAT SITS INSIDE?
YOUR GUESS YOU SEE

TEXTLET

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•  16 November 2015  •  View comments