2020 Honours Photography

Cathy Ross

Texture of Grief

Texture of Grief is a photographic essay that combines documentary photography with poetry to render visible the ordinarily invisible. This work attempts to explore the limits of photographic representation in conveying the phenomenology of grief. Photography has inherent evidentiary value as a medium, yet as a representational tool photography has clear limitations. Though grief is something most of us will experience in our lifetime, its expression has been repressed. A lack of ritualistic convention, combined with the medicalisation of death and grief, has repackaged grief into an individual and pathologised illness to be dealt with in private. This attitude has resulted in grief becoming less inconvenient to society and far more profound on the individual.

When Jane lost her first pregnancy at 19 weeks, she put it in a box and pushed it down. She told only her closest family and went back to work as if nothing happened. Now, 12 years later, she's pulling it out and sharing her story. Jane’s story is told through a series of photographs supplemented with poetry in an ongoing collaboration with the artist. The works navigate terrain that is often taboo and shameful. Through Jane’s grief, viewers will see their own losses reflected, and come to understand the losses of others with greater empathy. Loss is profound and devastating. Grief is uncomfortable and unfamiliar. We all do it differently but some of it is the same. Texture of Grief deliberately creates a space for grief to be acknowledged and validated, while simultaneously highlighting the absence of such a space in regular society.

Keywords: Documentary photography, visual sociology, phenomenology, grief, mourning, representation.

Celina Rigby

Ageing: Retirement Overdue

Using documentary photography, Ageing: Retirement Overdue focuses on ageing in contemporary Australian society. The research investigates the potential for photographic storytelling to provoke thought and inspire new conversations. The series interrogates how the social structure can force a person to work in their retirement age, which is portrayed through my father, John Rigby and his lived experience. Collaboration is a key method in creating my father’s visual story. The process involved spending a significant amount of time together as I observed his daily activities and learned about his life experiences. Various mediums are used to represent his personal and professional life. This includes handwritten text which is presented in his own personal journal, images and a video/gif depicting his ageing, work and day-to-day-life, allowing the audience to immerse into his world.

The intention of this project is to explore and share the reasoning why John is forced to work beyond the traditional retirement age—to sustain his family’s wellbeing—and ascertain the audiences’ compassion. Interpreting my father’s life from a personal perspective, creating a visual/photographic story, my aim is to create awareness on this social and political issue to encourage the audience to reflect on their own life experiences.

Keywords: Ageing, Retirement, Family, Personal experiences, Documentary photography, Collaborative Storytelling.

Leisa Turner

The Fabricated Feminine

The notion of hegemonic beauty standards is a pervasive and irrepressible imperative that women are continually required to negotiate. The patriarchal culture of the Renaissance cultivated gender difference to establish the feminine stereotype and mark out the criterions of a woman’s appearance that have persisted in varied form ever since. Similarly, mediums such as embroidery became engendered as feminine leading to a diminished perception of textile craft and the decorative, something further entrenched by the patriarchal machinations of modern art in the mid-twentieth century. This honours project employs humour as an artistic strategy to disrupt culturally ingrained feminine beauty norms and draws on Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity, in considering the legacy of feminine and decorative tropes. Historically, feminist art practitioners have utilised humorous, confrontational and discomforting strategies to critique normative stereotypes of femininity. However, patriarchal attitudes, including the culturally imbedded notion that women have little capacity for comedy, often led to a reading of feminist humour as aggressive.

This honours project reaffirms humour as an effective strategy for challenging the contemporary perception of feminine beauty standards. A discussion of photography’s expanded field contextualises the creation of a series of photographic objects combining photo-collage and stop-motion animation with hand-embroidered embellishment of found textiles. As photography’s role in the propagation of feminine beauty standards is indelible, this project works to disrupt the never-ending stream of idealised depictions of women saturating our visual field. By combining expanded photography and humour, this honours project creates an opportunity for disruption by drawing pointed attention to the absurdity of beauty standards.

Keywords: Humour, Beauty Standards, Femininity, Expanded photography, Photo-object, Textile, Embroidery, Decorative, Collage, Stop-motion animation.

Rhiannon Whitaker

The Space Between Place: Immersing the Human Form Within Nature

The Space Between Place: Immersing the Human Form Within Nature employs environmental dance and photography to explore the interconnected relationships between humans and the Australian natural environment. Through both choreographed and improvised environmental dance, this project explores how such processes, as a form of generating new ecological knowledge and deeper human connections to the body, can more broadly reinforce relationships between humans and the natural environment. Specifically of interest, is how this method can further connect women to a more existential understanding of their own bodies. The medium of photography is used to facilitate the exploration of time and the body’s relationship to space and mortality. Moreover, photography can consolidate the momentary or collective ‘trace’ of the human form on the landscape – embedding the body in the space, yet also obscuring it.

Within the final installation, the framed photographic series and projected video work create an experiential extension of the landscape within the exhibition space. From afar, the photographs will likely be perceived as landscapes, however upon a more intimate examination, the female forms will unfold, suggesting an interconnectedness between the figures and their environment. The scale, space and light initiate a bond between the photographic works and the way in which the audience are encouraged to move within the space. Drawn on a different route, and displaying their own improvised movement, it is intended that the viewer gain a greater rumination into how environmental dance can generate this deeper human connection to body and nature.

Keywords: Eco-feminism, environmental dance, eco-phenomenology, body, nature, photography, time.

Rose Hocking

Momentaneum Visum

Momentaneum Visum examines the Anthropocene through the conflation of place, space, memory and affect, specifically focused on localised landscapes within the Sunshine Coast and Hinterland. This project investigates the Anthropocene through a series of photographic images that explore a personal representation of a disrupted view of the natural landscape, activating a connection between audience and environment to inspire both personal and environmental reflection. I have chosen to investigate reflection within this project as it conflates multiple environments or environmental elements into a single image, fracturing the natural perception of the landscape. Reflection is used both within the images and within the gallery, reflecting people as they move through the space, confronting them with their own image amongst those of the landscapes raising questions of their own impact and relationship with the natural environment. This reflection within the space echoes the subjects of the photographs where the use of figures and limbs within the reflections makes us aware of a human presence. This then asks the audience to acknowledge humanities impact on the environment, highlighting that these landscapes could be changed and lost due to human impact.

Keywords: Anthropocene, Environment, Connection, Human Intervention, Reflection, Landscape.

Yan Zhang

A Seed in the Ocean – Rediscover Images of Agrarian Workers in Contemporary Chinese Art

My project investigates the under-representation of agrarian workers in Chinese visual culture that emerged in the wake of the cultural revolution. In this forty-year period, social realist images of agrarian workers, who were once the heroes of the Chinese state, were erased in favour of a globalized contemporary aesthetics.

The absence of agrarian workers in visual culture serves an acquiescence to the loss of farmland and the collapse of rural communities as an inevitable cost of modernization, leaving the complexity and possibilities of this social space unexplored. The significance of reviving the images of agrarian workers is not only to reassert a right of representation, and more importantly to negotiate a space to sustain the agrarian living.

My studio practice aims to make portraits with beans and grains for the elders in my home village in the pictorial tradition they prefer. I particularly restore the characteristics of the subject acting as "co-author" in studio photographs in the 1960s-70s. Agrarian labour is re-enacted in the process of repetitively laying and sorting beans and grains. A visual language that embodies realism, materiality and labour enables me to connect my community with a broader audience. A series of prints and a participatory installation, as the final outcome, invite viewers to rethink their perception of “others” by recontextualizing and reinterpreting photographic images.

Keywords: Agrarian workers, contemporary Chinese art, portraiture, social realism, materiality, participatory art.