GradFoto 2021 Gallery

Award Winner – Meg De Young

The Conversations We Have, 2021

The AUD $500 prize was awarded by the judges to graduate Meg De Young from RMIT University, for their series The Conversations We Have.

The judges said, “There’s something wonderfully deadpan about this serious yet tender series of performed images by Meg De Young. The images are playful but also have a sense of underlying tension. There is a mixture of tenderness and distance, mimicry and truth, highlighting the complexity of the mother/daughter relationship. The images are absurdly compelling and the theory behind them is dark and tempting.”

Artist Statement

The Conversations We Have is a collaboration with my mother that explores how the mother/daughter relationship is a socially constructed idea. The work uses collaborative theatre as a way to destabilise patriarchal narratives related to mother-daughter intimacy, mother-blame, matrophobia (the fear of turning into one’s own mother) and motherhood as a social construct. By subverting these narratives with our bodies in the domestic space, we explore the patriarchal construction of the mother-daughter relationship. Through this process of collaboration and performance, I critique and deconstruct these narratives to reclaim our relationship in its own image. Through practice led research I explore feminist perspectives on mother-daughter relationships. Specifically, I feel the research contributes to an underexplored field in photography and art. While the social construction of motherhood has been explored in contemporary art, the mother-daughter relationship is less explored. The aim of this work is to expose the narrative for what it truly is, an ideology. This is not the true experience of the mother-daughter relationship. The Conversations We Have is the process of beginning a dialogue between my mother and I and the journey to rewriting our own narrative that truly reflects our lived experience.

Brittany Hefren

Listening to Lilacs, 2021

When the mind has become a messy tangle of self-made illusions, shadows of worry, self-doubt, and comparison, how does one find hope?  Tired of the twisted perspectives of my own inner monologue, I looked up. I choose the practice of walking – slowly. Breathing in the outside air. Asking better questions. What wisdom can I gain from the trees? What song are the flowers singing?

My imagination is like a rose bush – stunningly beautiful, a thing of poetry. Yet its thorns can catch me off guard if I become too enchanted with the rose and fail to take care. Luckily, all that is required to get the most out of a rose bush is a good pruning. One can remove the thorns once they take care to discover where they hide.

Someone once told me there is almost always a breakdown before a breakthrough. There is nothing lost, nothing wasted. My past has become compost, creating the fertile ground my future is planted in.

Daniel Longo

Scenes of Castrations & Gazes Upon Control, 2021

Scenes of Castrations & Gazes Upon Control seeks to represent the abject in material forms using fragmented forms of the body.

Through a practice-led and material thinking approach, I seek to represent and give a material form to the abject. I am concerned with the study of experience from the perspective of the individual. More specifically, I intend to explore the abject self in a state of abjection and then create fragmented forms of body. In this project, the body becomes a symbolic and aesthetic expression of the abject. Driven by personal experience and acknowledging my desire to be castrated, the abject self in a state of abjection is the core driving force behind creative nuances and materiality.

This project uses photography and digital manipulation for all final outcomes. The materialism involved in depicting the ‘realism of the body, entails recognising that the body is not an external static representation’ (Cokal, 2000 p. 123) but is susceptible to ‘breakdown, fragmentation, and dissolution’ (Cokal, 2000 p. 124). Consequently, the fragmented body is a way to explore questions of abjection and the self.

Finn Goldstraw

The series of images that I have chosen for GradFoto 2021 are all products of experimentation and development. The rationale of these works was to explore and play with the technical elements of the photography process. The individual works and series that I have chosen are all created through experimentation with printing and collage processes over photography prints.

The poems are experiments with scanning as photography. All were completed within my bedroom using an inkjet home printer, photoshop and an analogue camera.

The ‘landscape’ duo and individual works use distressing, collage, and printing techniques to add texture and depth to each work.

The ‘colour’ and ‘abstract’ series experiment with colour, texture, and contrast through the printing process. Both series explore printing repetition and enable me to investigate texture and colour throughout the different works.

The ‘negative’ series plays with the idea of creating negative and positive images using photography shot with film. The collage of both the original and inverted images gives an insight into the analogue film process as well as how light and shadows are used to create each image.

Generally, photography is seen as two dimensional. I am interested in exploring the possibilities of the photograph as more than a two-dimensional image but rather a three-dimensional object.

Jane Fitzgerald

Ordinary, 2021

There is something to be seen in the ordinary, that can often be overlooked. In this series, I wanted to highlight the beauty in the banal. To take a moment to look deeper. With the washed out colour theme, ordinariness turns into something sweetly appealing and eye catching, in a subtle unassuming way. I want to convey the feeling of ordinariness, and draw attention to the beauty in the overlooked. Ordinary can be comforting and soothing. Ordinary is commonplace, nothing special about it, nothing distinctive. Ordinary is not different or unexpected in any way. I want to convey a feeling of peace, serenity, soothing and comforting images in their ordinary simplicity. Ordinary is comforting… there is comfort in the ordinary… it can soothe. The colours and tones are flat and washed out, cleansed, to feel ordinary to the viewer. This series is of the ordinary, nothing to take your breath away, but still beautiful in their simplicity.

Meredith Marshallsea

My art practice uses photography to create ambiguous forms by capturing the human body moving through an interior space. I am interested in the temporal areas this blurring creates and how they can provoke a presence and absence within the image. To further explore and heighten these images’ mysterious nature, they are physically placed in a liminal space by either projection or held by a hand. This process investigates the in-between spaces and the narratives these spaces evoke when strange/mysterious images create portals to other worlds. By combining these elements, I explore how a liminal space transforms into a realm that evokes a weird and eerie quality.

Panayiotis Kasseris

Πατρίδα αραεύω σε (I am Looking for a Homeland), 2021

Being born and raised in a village on a small island in Greece gave me certain experiences that shaped my childhood. Migrating to Australia in 2012 when I was eighteen years old shook me and my understanding of everything but most importantly the understanding of what is home.

In this project titled Πατρίδα αραεύω σε which translates to ΄I am looking for a homeland΄ I am looking into how I can use memories from my childhood and adulthood in a way to connect the two different Me’s. The Me growing up in Greece and the Me becoming an adult in Australia, through my relationship with the people that link those two worlds and especially my mother.

Richard Langley

Elevations, 2021

Elevations is a collection of discarded and appropriated objects. It is a documentary project, cataloguing the overlooked and abandoned objects of my everyday. Rather than seek the historical false neutrality of typological photography, Elevations uses assemblage to playfully resist the prior classifications and imposed understandings of the documented objects. The objects are brought back into consciousness through an expansion of possibilities.

Unfixed and impermanent, the assemblages are balanced, woven, stacked, and bent. As they wait for their next collapse, their documentation is a conservation project outlasting what it depicts. However, unlike the conservation photography of Ansel Adams, Elevations approaches the landscape through the objects taken from it and discarded to it, playing with the possibility of seeing something else.

Sevim Dogan Ozkan

My Mother Tells Me, 2021

My Mother Tells Me (2021-) is an ongoing project that aims to explore the connection between past and present by engaging with notions of childhood, identity and memory. I’m now a mother, at the age my father was when he passed away, and I find I’m clinging onto my memories, urgently attempting to record, re-create and re-tell them. It comes from a place of fear –to not be forgotten. A plea to my children to understand some fragments of my childhood, although they are unable to relate to my birthplace, no photographs to browse, a grandfather they never met.

My first-ever photograph was taken at the age of eleven against the brick wall of my primary school. I don’t have a copy of this photograph. My story before then is my own narrative, built on what I think I remember.

In order to tell the story, this project brings together archival and reconstructed images. The images I’ve created draw from my everyday life and experiences. They reflect on the tension between my longing for home and my developing sense of belonging in Australia. It is this in-between place that fuels the telling.

The story is narrated by my eleven-year-old daughter Ada and told from her perspective. Through creating this work, I feel that I am a step closer to converting what is mine, to what is ours.

Teva Cosic

Puno Puno, Lacu Noć, 2021

Puno Puno, Lacu Noć (meaning lots and lots, goodnight) extended from a desire to reconnect to my Croatian heritage after the death of my grandmother in 2020. Through praxis it seeks to complicate a reductive view of nostalgia and follows the assertion that longing for the past can be oriented towards both change and transformation in positive and productive ways.

Working with the photobook form, the project broadly explores how personal and collective narratives of migration, identity and belonging are entangled and embedded within nostalgia. From the perspective of a third-generation Croatian, the work speculates on where culture lies as it attempts to both locate a sense of connection whilst also reconciling feelings of my own displacement through the creative act. The photographic encounters, archival sources and other visual investigations that make up the project become points on a map that constellate my own narratives with those of the broader Croatian community and aims to further contextualise intergenerational experiences of migration within the contemporary Australian landscape.