A Reflection on the Fragility of the Human Experience

In what started as a personal healing process, the work by Australian artist Sophie Gabrielle combines several visual strategies to create a multi-layered narrative that challenges our perception and tells us about the artists’ experiences with cancer.

is an exploration of my own experience with cancer through optics, chemical interactions, and an investigative process that examines photographing something invisible to the naked eye.

This project started as a coping mechanism to address the impact it has had upon me when all the males in my family were diagnosed with stage 4 cancer over the last two years.

They are a sense of the unsettled, fragile, daunting, and overwhelming.

Medicinal botanicals and portraits are set alongside archival images found in medical research catalogues, creating a space in which the past and present co-exist. The images are left under plates of glass to catch my skin particles and then rephotographed in manifold - intertwining myself and creating an abstract self-portrait. These small cells impact the image in such a way that they are transformed into something new; a growth from the product of its surroundings.

Words and Pictures by Sophie Gabrielle.

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Sophie Gabrielle is a Melburn based contemporary photographer and curator whose work has been exhibited in Australia, Malaysia, The Netherlands, France, Germany, USA and the UK and was the first Australian to be announced as a Foam Talent in 2018. Her work investigates the connection between photography and psychology, using staged photographs and archive imagery. Find her on PHmuseum and Instagram.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PHmuseum curators.