GradFoto 2020 Gallery

Award Winner – Shuran Yang

Hedgehog Family, 2020

The AUD $500 prize, generously supported by Craig Fletcher, was awarded by the judges to graduate Shuran Yang from RMIT University for her series Hedgehog Family.

The judges said, “Shuran Yang’s concept and its visual articulation are coherent as is the series itself where reiteration is used to poetic affect. The images are beautifully composed and retain a level of mystery, they don’t give everything away at once… The duality within the family dynamic resonates strongly throughout the series. You can feel the tension and proximity of the Hedgehog family in this creative response to lockdown and relate to both the intimacy and suffocation that comes with loss of personal distance.”

When winter comes, the hedgehog family wants to snuggle up together for warmth. If they get too close, their thorns will prick each other, and if they are too far away, they will feel the cold creeping in. According to this classic Chinese proverb, the hedgehog family perpetually keep looking for the right distance. This is related to the traditional Chinese concept of filial piety, where instead of letting children have their career away from home, parents tend to want more of their children’s company at home in adulthood.
I live in a traditional Chinese family where this is inherently understood, but being in my early 20’s, and having been educated in the western system, I long for independence, freedom, and a healthy distance from my family. Turning this longing into a reality is a difficult undertaking, especially under lockdown; how can I persuade my parents to try and rid themselves from fear and let me go? I am the hedgehog child, looking for the right distance.

Wendy Catling

Nightshade, 2020

Nightshade utilises digital photography, archival photographs and documents, installation, video, and web content to explore themes of power, control, obsession and trauma. The project is an exploration of domestic abuse and violence through the experiences of my mother during her 20-year relationship with my father.
I have made connections between my mother’s resistance to abuse from my father, and her passion for protecting plants from the damaging effects of weeds. The domination and inhibition of other plants by weeds parallels the coercive control of domestic abusers. One weed became a key motif throughout the project. The black nightshade is found along the waterways and bike paths our shared local area. With its attractive flowers and berries, sometime poisonous, sometimes edible, the nightshade became a metaphor for the duality of my father’s outward good looks and charm, and violent control in private. Since their separation in the 1980s followed by my father’s death in a car accident, my mother has volunteered in outer suburban bush reserves, promoting the growth of native plants by removing environmental weeds. She is now 90 and still living independently, with a garden full of beautiful plants which she obsessively keeps weed free.

Yask Desai

Telia, 2020

My work Telia involves the use of archival materials, documentation and the creation of self-authored photographs to pay a subjective homage to the men who migrated from undivided India and worked as hawkers in rural Australia between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries. I have sought to discover a balance between the creation of new imagery and the utilisation of existing visual material. In this sense Telia may be seen to be following the methodology stated by Fontcuberta that, “preserving a sustainable equilibrium within the universe of images requires coordinating the containment of production with acts of recovery”.
The purpose of the work is not to create a definitive reinterpretation of existing histories of the men who worked as hawkers. Instead I attempt to adopt a methodology that combines the study of existing subjective histories with visually based production and recovery that creates meaning, and offers a historically orientated socio-political narrative concerning specific race relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within colonial Australia. Telia is important because much of the existing academic and visually based discussion of the hawkers positions them in a singularly historical context and separates them from present conceptions and discussions of Australian identity. Telia however associates contemporary notions of Australian identity with past historical milieus and constructs.

Steph Doran

Tsunagari. 2020

Tsunagari is a Japanese word that can mean connection, link, bond or relationship. The project incorporates these concepts in a diaristic exploration of the effects of physical separation within the context of a cross-continental relationship. It depicts both the mundanity of the passing of time when waiting ‘in limbo’, as well as the struggle of two people trying to navigate a path back to each other. Though modern technology facilitates interaction in times of separation, the project puts into question its effectiveness as a substitute for offline intimacy. Tsunagari depicts the authenticity of a relationship that has been put on hold by an international pandemic through collected, commissioned, captured and recombined imagery.

Hongya Liu

The Red Veil, 2020

My project explored the topic of “Marriage in China” and discussed a social phenomenon in China where countless young people of marriageable age who are not married are being pressured by their elders to get married. In traditional Chinese values, getting married is a task that must be accomplished by everyone who has reached the right age. In the Chinese marriage market, there are some invisible conditions such as age, appearance, wealth, education, etc. This has led to a lot of labels, such as leftover woman, bachelor. I use performative staged photography, self-deprecating humor and self-portraiture in order to discuss themes of cultural difference, personal and collective histories, mental health, self-exploration, gender equality and social expectations. From my perspective, this work represents the protest of our younger generation who have received different cultural education to that of our more traditional-minded parents.

Skye Wagner

Opacity Shift, 2020

‘Opacity Shift’ is my MFA body of work completed at the start of 2020. In this collection of photographs, I have intended to destabilise the way people perceive familiar and often under-considered visual and material cultural forms. To create these photographs, I build large three-dimensional assemblages in the studio using a combination of objects, armatures, and printed images. These assemblages are photographed from various vantage points to confuse pictorial space and to produce the ‘appearance’ of digital software effects. The objective is to play with the depictive capacities of photography to highlight the constructed nature of image-making.
The photographs are filled with an array of incongruous yet everyday content such as food, tools, human and non-human body parts, domestic products and stock imagery. Content which I have gleaned from online image searches, in second-hand books and within supermarket produce sections. The drive is to charge this mix of image-parts with the potential for movement, transformation and contextual reconfiguration. I imagine the photographic works as fragments from one accumulating image; not serialised units but rather dissections from an undisciplined image flow. This is a relational response to the linked and mutable quality of contemporary digital image ecologies.

Joshua Smith

Lignite, 2020

Lignite examines ecology and place in the modern industrial landscape of the Latrobe Valley – a landscape which has been shaped by decades of environmental discourse and mistreatment due to the region’s extended coal mining history. The mining of brown coal (lignite) was the Latrobe Valley’s lifeblood for generations, though its production and consumption not only benefitted the local economy but also inevitably cost the stability of human health and the environment.
The project observes the manifestations of human activity within the landscape; often juxtaposing the forms of built and natural sceneries with observations of subtle intricacies – found amongst the Latrobe Valley’s lesser explored fringes. Lignite engages its subject matter in an expanded documentary mode with a rhetoric that looks at human accountability within the spaces we occupy.

Lauren Murray

To Wandiligong, 2020

To Wandiligong: a visual journey through memory, time, space, light and landscape and fourteen layers of glass.
This project maps a journey, between Melbourne and Wandiligong a small town in the foothills of the Victorian Alpine region using the filter of glass in the form of camera lenses, car windows and even glasses to photograph distant landmarks. The glass surface of an iPad is an additional layer of glass through which the digitally manipulated photographic images were created. There is distance created through these layers, which expresses a specific form of Topophilia, one of remoteness emphasised by the speed of the car from which the images were captured. They are a fleeting expression of the nature of light, time and love of place. The ordinary is made extraordinary by placing knowledge of the familiar into a context which is at once unexpected yet recognisable. These images imagine a visual proposition which records the grace and fragility of our planet, and emphasises the change and upheaval taking place in the landscape. Some images are a response to recent natural disasters others are prescient; visual narratives of what was to come. All are a homage to the fragile beauty of our land.

Madi Whyte

Topos, 2020

‘Topos’ the series explores finite landscapes as pictorial tropes to explore languages of precision, form and the cut. This body of work focuses on atypical viewpoints, geographic coordinates and the examination of her composite relationship to various landscapes, forms and topos. Influenced by her own rural upbringing on Gunditjmara land, Madi explores the multifarious and undulating connection she shares with the land – how it behaves as a metaphor, material and teacher. The series proposes the artist to discover an emblematic and personal correlation between the formal qualities of the rural Australian landscape and the abstracted spatial compositions of her images.

Christina Tzimas

Altered Landscapes, 2020

This series of images explores the way we view and imagine nature. Often traditional landscape photography depicts ethereal and tranquil scenes of absolute perfection. I wanted to construct imaginary landscapes that are overdone, overloaded and overwhelmed. Through combining various natural aspects that contrast each other, I aim to create a scene that still remains harmonious. I have chosen to work with natural landscapes from my personal archive, primarily focusing on those I have previously rejected because of technical imperfections. These have been digitally merged together and reworked, exaggerating the defining elements of each original image. The images together create an idyllic artificial realm that is inspired by nature, whilst having an almost impossible existence.