Home and Away

Time, Rocks, Place 2022. Argyrotype print selected for Fugitive exhibition at Hill End, NSW.

There is a sense of comforting arrival when you return home after an extended absence. Everything familiar gains a sheen of nostalgia that can be easy to slip on like an old pair of slippers. It’s a great time to reassess what you left behind and are coming back to.

I find there is a burst of cleaning and tidying that comes upon me where I can harness that homecoming energy. I’d been dreaming and planning a reorganisation of my studio for months, but it all felt too overwhelming. I knew where I needed to start but didn’t have the resolve to upend everything for a complete reset.

Yet it only took two hours when I returned home this week to completely rearrange my studio back to what it was more than five years ago. A space totally devoted to art with clean benches, organised storage and tools tidied and ready for use.

I knew that it was going to be hard to come back to clutter after having a huge space at the artist residency in which to spread out and experiment. I needed to reclaim my own space, to carve out emptiness so that the experimentation can continue.

One of the great joys of being away is that when you return, you can make a fresh start. I’ve realised that I love experimenting with images, using alternative photographic processes like cyanotype and argyrotype prints to create visual stories.

These processes have been easily transportable for my artist residencies in Australia and overseas. It meant that I could print transparencies of my photographs then translate these into multilayered stories about place; from the derelict houses in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, to stories of ice and stones in Iceland and the coastal Moonah trees of the Mornington Peninsula.

I was happy to learn this week that some of the argyrotype prints made at my artist residency at the Island Darkroom on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland in 2022 have been accepted for an analogue photographic exhibition at Hill End, NSW in November.

These are some of my favourite images from my Stone Stories project, connecting the stories of dispossession due to the Highland and Island Clearances of the 1800s, to the dispossession of homes due to extreme climate events such as the 2022 floods in northern NSW.

It is these notions of home which have been a continuing theme running through my artworks for years. I am always exploring ideas of what constitutes ‘home’ and how a sense of home can be created in places we travel to when away.

I think of the table and chair set up in my recent artist residency. How solitary and lonely they first felt when I walked into that space. Yet after only a short period of occupancy, I was able to create a sense of home. Now I am able to do the same in my own studio, reclaim my space, reset my thinking and get cracking on making more art.

Creating a temporary home away from home

Artist residency - works in progress