The exhibition features a series of digital prints derived from original paper collages that explore the vitality of images – images as living things that impart a certain energy. The series draws on Greek mythology, ideas of metamorphosis and shifting forms, entanglements with the natural world, and the elusive aspects of images that cannot be immediately unravelled.

The works use found material featuring objects from classical antiquity, specifically photographic reproductions of sculptural artefacts that depict gods, hybrids, and mythological beings. These source images resonate with an unfixed quality, in part due to the nature of images that precede digital reproduction – bearing both the grain of analogue photography and the trace of mass-produced imaging, such as misregistration and halftone printing. Further abstracted and re-contextualised through the process of collage, vegetal, mineral, and cosmological forms intersect, accumulate, and diffuse across the artefacts. Enigmatic interrelations, new visual sediments and seams, the overlaying of living flora, and the complex play of surfaces, result in images that stir with a sense of life force and material trace, despite being flattened multiple times by the camera.  

Collages are always in movement, suggesting new symmetries and meanings; this idea is further emphasised through the subject of the source content used in this series, which reference stories of change and transformation, as well as through something beyond surface value alone: the sense of an image turning, resisting interpretation and just on the cusp of slipping away.

View The Surface Ripples at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy Library, opening hours below:

Monday: 10am to 6pm
Tuesday: 10am to 6pm
Wednesday: 10am to 8pm
Thursday: 10am to 8pm
Friday: 10am to 6pm
Saturday: 10am to 4pm
Sunday: 2pm to 5pm