At the beginning of this year, I was invited by the Redcliffe Art Gallery to participate in Fresh Eyes 2025, a biannual exhibition for emerging artists in the region. The invitation was an exciting surprise and it also filled me with uncertaintly and anxiety. I immediately accepted the Fresh Eyes commission, even though it was scary and I had no idea how I was going to manage the two other exhibitions to which I had already committed. I know I’m not alone in experiencing this sort of continuous insecurity when it comes to bringing often very private and deeply felt creations out of the studio. This has gotta be a topic for discussion at Art Lab one day for sure!
I’m also preparing work for two exhibitions opening in August. Collages from the Ladies’ Home Journal series will be shown in a group exhibition, Toward HOME, at the Old Fire Station Gallery in Redcliffe. At the same time, new work from the Language of Posing series will be exhibited in Aha! Moments at The Hub Gallery in Caboolture. All the while, I’ll continue working on a series of still-untitled collages for Fresh Eyes 2025.
Long story short, all of my work for the last few years is about making sense of my presence in the world, exploring ideas around womanhood and feminism Making and experimenting helps me understand how the representation of women in the media can act as a form of social control. It also leads me to think about the gaze, and how ways of seeing connects to the ways we expand into and shape our local environments.
And yet, the making for Fresh Eyes 2025 has been a whole new thing, expanding ideas of womanhood to thinking about our human presence in the world. For this project I am building upon the use of photography and collage in ways I haven't done in the past, incorporating the techniques and an aesthetic that has become central to my making.
Generating photographic images for this project has been a steep learning curve. It has been instrumental in opening my eyes to the landscapes in which I live. I've tried hard not to let the technical aspects of photography overwhelm my desire to anchor the images in my local environment. Figuring out Lightroom and Photoshop is an ongoing process and for sure, as I turn 64 in a few days time, I can honestly say that if I can keep going the way I am going I won't have to take up Sudoku to keep my brain active!
The making is still very much in progress, but it is taking shape as I work toward the Fresh Eyes 2025 exhibition later this year.