Artist Statement

Reality Soup Recipe* - This delicious but unpredictable recipe has been in my family for generations. I've consumed it since before I can remember, and it always reminds me of home.

Ingredients

1 Arrow of time

1 Standard Model

1 Bunch photons

Method (for pictured soup)

1 Check arrow of time is pointing forward

2 Using a laser, fire photons at an agitated surface

3 Capture 0.5 seconds of reflected photons with CMOS sensor

4 Eat with your eyes, using spoon provided

* May make something stranger. Probably does.

Soup's up!  BEN BLICK-HODGE

Artist Statement

Cow, queen of the grassland, sat upon a castle made of ants.
An uncomfortable truth telling of Australia's farming identity, stolen land and our total disconnection from the reality of our "Snags on the Barbie" culture.

Cow Queen  VIOLET BOND

Artist Statement

During the flood recovery in Lismore I helped clean up at a friends house, in all the flooded objects we came across a carousel of his family slides. I offered to take them and restore anything I could. Through the process of scanning, retouching and restoring the images I came across this image, deciding to leave it in the poetic state I found it.

35mm slide recovered in lismore floods 2022 CLAIRE CONROY

Artist Statement

River, Mud & Silver Studded Boots is part of a larger project of Light Drawings. This project began as a response to the lockdown period in 2021 and has continued through 2022. Each unique chemigram originally created on silver gelatin paper encapsulates ideas of chance and uncertainty, an expression of the unknown and what has been felt during this time.

This work also draws from personal histories, growing up in rural Australia in the late 80s and early 90s, the mix of textures and imprints of the landscape with the contrasting embrace of punk fashion at the time.

River, Mud & Silver Studded Boots  SIMONE DARCY

Artist Statement

There are many theories that our sense of "self" is defined by our beahviours that are reflected back to different social groups and situations. I present different selves to vastly different social groups and rarely feel like I am truly "me". This work is an exploration of the sense of self that I experience when in solitude making images in the landscape.

In this work the mirrored cubes represent those different senses of self, removed from the social world, and reflecting back nothing but the landscape. I finally feel free to quietly exist as I make images.

Landscape of Solitude #1  LUKE DAVID

Artist Statement

In the dynamic ecosystem of land, air and water, all things including fire and floods find their desired pathway from one place to another. Whether a migratory bird or an animal finding a way to water, food these pathways are essential for navigating life. This work traverses not only our existential desire pathway through life and art, but also considers and acknowledges the shared desires of Place of things more-than-human.

Desire Paths  VICTORIA COOPER & DOUG SPOWART

Artist Statement

Traces of beauty exist everywhere around us. The image shows that this can be found just around the corner in all of our daily lives. Many people however may not see the beauty in the ordinary, either being too busy, caught up in their daily hustle, or have simply just not spent the time looking to appreciate the details of everyday ordinary spaces and surrounds. Sometimes all we may need is the time & space to be able to pause to experience them. This image is was made with medium format film.

Once was  MARK FORBES

Artist Statement

We are accepting there will be more Covid deaths, as our society tries to find "normal". Life for some vulnerable "high risk" people is their contemporary lifestyle choice.

Time and relationships irrelevant, days merge, contained, among written memories of other times, a far-seeing telescope, a couch to sleep on. Curtains shade reminders of life, alcohol dulls the pain and encourages sleep. Time passes.

Painful aloneness, living it, is a contemporary lifestyle for some.

Contemporary lifestyle  LYNDALL GERLACH

Artist Statement

Everywhere in the Sydney area there are deep water views. The movement of the water often reflects in splashes of light and drifts of fast moving patterns on the buildings. The early evening lights and small boat lights are reflected in deep water, taking on a magic velvet quality.

The city's windows reflect the passing people and cares, flashing images or colour, undetermined shapes and chaotic patterns. So busy. In the city everywhere, the city structure predominates.

Night city-ness #1   LYNDALL GERLACH

Artist Statement

"Upside Down Country" is a term often used by First Nations people to describe the environmental disruption of the land.

"Renegotiating Lake Eyre" deals with the issue of human intervention in the landscape across remote regions of the world. Although necessary to promote land wellbeing and look after 'Country', our interference with land resources are overwhelmingly destructive.

This prints is made using the Photogravure process. A combination of photography and traditional etching.

Renegotiating lake Eyre  SILVI GLATTAUER

Artist Statement

For some this is a reality, as it once was for me and is now hidden in history. Blue moods, blue days, blue bruises. Bruises on skin, bruises on mind, and bruises on spirit. It happens in the dark of closed doors and practiced lies. What is hidden in shadows and darkness is far worse than what you see and what is hinted at in averted eyes and excuses. No more. NO MORE!

What's Hidden in Shadows  SUE GORDON

Artist Statement

Echo Chamber is an ever-expanding series of abstract landscapes created to emphasise the algorithmic nature of the digital terrain. Pixels interest me because they are the smallest visible controllable element of a digital image; beyond the pixel is just pure information‚ bits of information. On a more personal note, I find it boring, monotonous, and uninspiring when contemporary photography remains within the safety of conceptual and historical boundaries, things like taking the easy path by simply photographically recreating a still life or taking a photo with the subject wearing a pretty mask or costume as if this is "cutting-edge" (and repeating this same process until it becomes meaningless). Taking a risk, even if this risk comes to nothing, is wonderfully rousing.

Arthur Boyd, Australian scapegoat, 1987 from the series Echo Chamber  KAILUM GRAVES

Artist Statement

This work was captured on 4x5 film looking out towards Mount Gulaga from the Wallaga Lake headland. I processed the negative with ocean water collected from site. When processing film with salt water the corrosive properties lifts the silver emulsion and the representational image is rendered vague. However an essence of the site is introduced to the frame as the vibrant matter paints its way onto the negative. A ghost of Gulaga looms behind the abstraction ~ felt rather than seen.

Mount Gulaga   SAMMY HAWKER

Artist Statement

These three portraits have been generated through artificial intelligence software from an array of self-portraits taken during Melbourne's 2021 lockdown. The images created define the inner turmoil and self-loathing as a result of isolation for a long period of time.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Self-Portraits  JOSHUA HEILBUTH

Artist Statement

Photography is mostly about capturing the real and the now, often spontaneously, sometimes more consciously. I am fascinated by the conjuncture of the two, the transient opportunity to record the light rather than the subject, to take advantage of nature and the built environment to photograph.

Only in the last year have I been able to add the fine scale distortion brought to us by gentle rain which creates a unique moment.

Rain 2  SUSAN HENDERSON

Artist Statement

There is something about an attempt to hold on and let go at the same time in an uncontrolled environment that is captured in this photograph. A visual expression of the current emotional terrain we find ourselves in.

Specimen  FIONA KEMP

Artist Statement

Abandonment of cities, offices, communities and lives, we left behind so much these last two years. The exodus leaves some things behind forever.

Exodus  TODD KENNEDY

Artist Statement

Like so many of us, I spent the past two years at home while the world lay in great turmoil. The idea of time as a linearity had become but an abstract concept; months and seasons melted into one, inside and out carried new roles and other meanings. Everybody longed to be together in a bodied way - everybody, too, longed for the natural world. I thought a lot about what photography can do. I wanted to make photographs that were both in waiting but also future-looking; of moments that held dreams, and moments that held hope.

Conversations from between the river and the sea  KATRIN KOENNING

Artist Statement

A photograph that I made shortly before being admitted to hospital; it touches on the nature of inter-personal relations, and the difficulties that depression, in particular, can introduce into this area of life. It was taken in situ - not as a set up, and was partly inspired by the Intimist approach.

On Depression, Wollongong  JOHN MCMANUS

Artist Statement

The song of a blackbird is truly melodious. I can listen for hours. Generally, it comes from a lone bird at rare intervals, but the depth of it goes beyond that single voice.

Looking at this work, an experimental outcome of ICM, I liken it to blackbirds, hovering together on overhead power lines or scratching around in the dirt beneath our feet.

Yet, beyond the real, can be found within, a magical chorus of musical notes, rising high across the airways, a blackbird's overture to the sun, as they welcome in the dawn.

Blackbird - Overture to the Sun  ANNE O'CONNOR

Artist Statement

From the time I was first shown a camera I was fascinated by the forms that light possesses and reveals. Life demands took me away from photography until my retirement. Since then I have embraced it. I came across the term 'luminer' - a bringer of light - recently. I see this as describing my ambitions in photography most exactly. I submit these photographs as approaches to this ambition.

Returning from the Sea  RICHARD OBORN

Artist Statement

Rain comes to take you, take your life, take your house, take your possessions, take your friends. The rivers rise, the rivers rise the rain comes the sorrow comes the drownings come. Your umbrellas are weak, unsustainable unless.

Rain  MICHAEL SHIRLEY

Artist Statement

The grief that comes from the earthly reality of a life’s end tears apart the incorporeal self. A catalyst of disruption shaping and changing future paths. The botanical circlet dates back millennia symbolising peace, honour and power, while the ironbark reflects an iron will, beauty, strength, and connection to place. Eddie, as his name suggested was our guardian and a wealth of love. Soaring above and shielding beneath is a spectrograph (soundwave analysis) of the title spoke in Latin.

scuto protectoris nostri coronati (nam Eddie) (crowned with the shield of our protector for Eddie))  CARA-ANN SIMPSON

Artist Statement

Loneliness, isolation, the act of hiding in plain sight, so we as humans negotiate our way through relationships with families, children, friends, work colleagues, and partners.

Men often struggle in different ways, the shame of their fear being seen sometimes too much to bear. Intergenerational indoctrination and hard-wiring the fact that expressing one’s feelings was not in any way helpful, or even ‘manly.’

In twelve step programs, participants are encouraged to turn their will over to the care of a Higher Power. This can be challenging, as sometimes will and control are often all that is left for some folk.

In this portrait, I imagine the protagonist stealing away from his domestic life (just behind one of these walls), struggling with his ‘surrender,’ debating a sticking point with his Higher Power.

“But if only I could just…”Negotiation (with a higher power)   STUART SPENCE

Artist Statement

During the Delta lock-down in Sydney 2021 I created a makeshift lab in my basement. I exposed my processed negatives to homegrown biological materials, cultivating an alternate reality that felt true to my experience, where the air itself was dangerous. Paradoxically this toxic environment felt safer than the outside world. Created while grieving for my father and experiencing deterioration of my vision, the loss and decay on the surface of the work has poignant parallels to my interior life.

Infected landscape  JULE SUNDBERG

Artist Statement

During the Delta lockdown in Sydney, 2021, I created new work by exposing old negatives from my archives to home grown biological materials.

In this image from 2002, my daughter is pictured at the cusp of adolescence. The fungal spores introduced to the negative have created a transcendent and luminous world, both strange and wondrous. Just as this moment in my daughter's life has gone forever, the negative also no longer exists, ultimately consumed by that which transformed it.

Transmutation  JULIE SUNDBERG 

Artist Statement

As an endeavour to circumvent the paradigms of contemporary human existence, I traverse the shores of Lake Weyba to observe and coalesce with the natural world, creating interpretive documents of my experiences along the way.

The title of this work comes from an essay by Astrida Neimanis - Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, a key text for my current explorations. Following a universal epoch of digital burnout and sensorial deprivation, Archive of Meaning & Matter encapsulates an exquisite exploration of the material and visceral, resurrecting moments of primordial connection to natural elements. As I transcended into the landscape, I ultimately embraced the experience as both an organic and techno being.

Archive of meaning & matter  BIANCA TAINSH

Artist Statement

‘Moth’ is from the series SMOTHER, a reinterpretation of the life of the Lady Bushranger Jessie Hickman (1890-1936) who adopted roles and disguises as a young circus performer and in her later life as a bushranger. Photographing Kandos locals in locations frequented by Hickman, I reveal her elusive identities in a historical context, where women shift like phantoms through the archives with names and roles ever-changing. Much like the mysterious, in-camera double exposures emerging from negatives in a darkroom. ‘Smother’ is circus jargon for a disguise. Exploring identity, the mythology of bushranging and the invisible history of women, these images pay homage to the solitary, camouflaged figure of Hickman.

Moth  JULIE WILLIAMS

Artist Statement

‘Olinda’ is from the series SMOTHER, a reinterpretation of the life of the Lady Bushranger Jessie Hickman (1890-1936) who adopted roles and disguises as a young circus performer and in her later life as a bushranger. Photographing Kandos locals in locations frequented by Hickman, I reveal her elusive identities in a historical context, where women shift like phantoms through the archives with names and roles ever-changing. Much like the mysterious, in-camera double exposures emerging from negatives in a darkroom. ‘Smother’ is circus jargon for a disguise. Exploring identity, the mythology of bushranging and the invisible history of women, these images pay homage to the solitary, camouflaged figure of Hickman.

Olinda  JULIE WILLIAMS