Summer Projects VII (Group Exhibition), Boom Gallery.
Geelong, 2020.
The camera has been—and continues to be—a tool used for control, surveillance, objectification, extraction and ownership. Problematic photography practices and the camera have been implicated in the colonial project of what is now known as Australia.
These self-portraits are a response to photographs of Aboriginal people created for ethnographic archival collections and research. They reflect on documentation and photographs of Ancestors held within state institutions.
As an Aboriginal woman, I am interested in using photography technologies in relational and interconnected ways, seeking to critique their colonial histories from an Indigenous perspective. In these photographs I use layering methods to submerse myself into Pitta Pitta Country, subverting the colonial gaze and typical power dynamics present in ethnographic archival collections and research. I am simultaneously photographer and photographed, researcher and researched. Dislocated from Pitta Pitta Country, yet always connected to Pitta Pitta Country.
Install image of Untitled I, 2020. Digital pigment print on cotton rag, 1300cm x 1285cm. Shown as part of Summer Projects VII at Boom Gallery 2020. Photo by Carli Wilson. 
Left to Right: Install image of Untitled II 2020, Fracture 2019, Burnt 2019. Digital pigments printed on cotton rag, 1300cm x 1285cm. Shown as part of Summer Projects VII at Boom Gallery 2020. Photo by Carli Wilson.
Left to Right: Install image of Untitled II 2020, Fracture 2019, Burnt 2019 and works by artist Ember Fairbairn. Shown as part of Summer Projects VII at Boom Gallery 2020. Photo by Carli Wilson.