Cut and Fold

This project explores my search for a place to call home, of trying to fit into new places, and of the slipperiness of language.

I am new here. I take photographs to help me look outside myself, to shape my view of the world and understand where I belong in it. I am an Australian artist who has lived abroad since 2012, first in the USA and now in Germany. I long to feel at home and have a constant feeling of not being in the right place. 

My time in Europe is underlined by a feeling of never quite getting my meaning across. I want to be able to communicate and to be understood in this world full of new languages and codes. My camera is a device that turns everything into a subject, that lets me look with close intention at the world as it indifferently goes on around me. I am drawn to photograph things that are covered up or draped over, species of plants thriving in the city, quiet moments of people going about their daily lives, things hiding in plain sight.

I cut up my photographs and make collages from them because I want to live in the tactile world of analog images. I show you the reverse side of the image, because I want to know, when did you last think about images as physical objects? These analog images have stories to tell, they carry their biographical information with them, like all of us. While the front of a photograph conveys the main story, the reverse side whispers a message too, if only we could decode it. Unlike the automatically generated data of digital images, the metadata of analog images is chemical, physical, encrypted.

All this is to say, when I take photographs of a veiled and quiet world, when I present to you the cut up backs of photographs, it is because I want to show you how slippery meaning can be. Like static on the radio, like a failed transmission, I hope for the meanings in these images to fall apart. If I feel lost, I want you to feel lost too.  

A note on installation 

I would like to present the work with the collages mounted in white object frames and the photographs printed large (around A2) on newsprint and pinned to the wall. The works can be arranged in a rhythmic presentation alternating between grids of newsprints and frames. The quantity of images can be selected based on the wall space available and the works can be shown on a single wall or across multiple walls. The reason for the choice of newsprint is that I have been experimenting with this form in the last two years and find it provides a journalistic feel that suits the observational concept of the project. It is important to me to show the collages in their original form, which are made from 35mm mini-lab photos mounted on coloured cards.