New Exhibition: Item Level
I’ve been busy in the studio over the last few months preparing for my upcoming solo exhibition at Five Walls in Melbourne.
Reflecting back through the window. 2012. Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. 50.91 x 70cm. Edition of 5 + 2 Ap.
The exhibition draws on imagery from my personal photographic archive, mostly created while living between London and Barcelona.
Architectural Detail (with feeling). 2015 (2024) . Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. 48 x 66.33cm. Edition of 5 + 2 Ap.
During that period, I was working full-time at the British Library in London, where I was involved in sorting, arranging, cataloguing, and rehousing a vast photographic archive of over 45,000 prints, negatives and slides. This experience profoundly shaped the development of my own work, sparking reflections on access, archival description, original order and how content can be recontextualized through arrangement.
Documentation: a section of the Fay Godwin Archive in its original boxes on shelves in the basement of the British Library (24 meters underground!). The material is awaiting to be re-located (via trolley) to my desk, for sorting, arranging and rehousing into preservation-friendly archive folders.
The title of my show, Item Level, refers to the most detailed level of archival description - from ‘fonds’ to ‘series’, ‘sub-series’, ‘folder’, and the final level: ‘item’ - a hierarchical structure designed to enhance accessibility and findability within an archive.
My interest in photography has always been centered on its paradoxical relationship to memory. While a photograph's pictorial content remains fixed, its meaning is in a continual state of flux. Each time we revisit a photograph, our interpretation shifts, influenced by the ever-evolving context of our present.
Memory of Pompeii [Into Yellow Realms]. 2016 (2024). Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Edition of 5 + 2 Ap. (The incompleteness of the image adds to the notion of the fragment as a representation of what was once whole. It emphasises that the photograph is a record of just a frame of time that was once experienced as pure time).
For every image in my archive, I can recall the precise moment it was taken—the physical place, and the emotions I felt at that time. This, in turn, evokes memories of other photographs in my archive, connected by a shared emotional resonance, a similar location, or certain formal elements within the picture: dappled light, a garden pathway, architectural details, a particular shade of colour, or the composition or material qualities. I can also recall the other instances when I’ve engaged with the image throughout its lifecycle, including the pictures it has been displayed with before.
With every exhibition, new relationships are formed, altering the emotional impact of the image and reshaping where it resides in my memory.
Studio Documentation 2020: ('Flourishing from then on')
Traditionally, archival description is fixed, objective and factual to help maintain the integrity of the material, but the central questions for this exhibition have been:
“How can I create ‘Item Level’ descriptions for these photographs, that capture this shifting nature of meaning and memory?
How can I describe material that has endless manifestations and inter-relationships, formal, and narrative connections? ”
In the exhibition, I’ve drawn on archival mechanisms (tables, folders, files, the trolley) to suggest this notion that order is not fixed, meaning is fluid, and the material is in a constant state of being sorted, processed and organised.
Studio Documentation August 2024: This custom-made trolley acts a symbol to suggest the continuous movement of material between locations. The folders stacked on each shelf, reveal only a single strip of image, framed by expanses of whiteness, with image fragments spilling out beyond the edges. The viewer is invited to draw connections between the glimpses of image revealed within these folders and the photographs displayed on the wall to uncover further layers of meaning.
The Experience of Looking (An Absence that Pervaded the Morning). 2008 (2024). Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Edition of 5 + 2 Ap.
The turned figure immersed in darkness is an onlooker to the window. The window acts as a metaphor for photography and how it frames subjective experience as well as being a symbol for interiority and exteriority.
Using playful installation strategies, text components, colour as an ordering device, and carefully placed works in dialogue with the gallery's architecture, I invite the viewer to slow down as they move through the space… To activate the experience of LOOKING and to draw upon their own memory of previous images to uncover meaning and engage with this new approach to photographic archival description — one that embraces the intuitive, subjective, and felt dimensions of photography.
All Lines Led me Here. 2019 (2024). Archival Inkjet Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. 37.5 x 50cm. Edition of 5 + 2 Ap.
For those of you in Melbourne, please come and join me at the Opening Reception of the exhibition at Five Walls on Friday, 30th of August, 6 - 8pm! The show runs until Saturday, 21st of September. More info about my art practice can be found here.
Archival Photographic Prints are available to purchase in person via the gallery or online.
