Inside Elands

Full description

BACKGROUND
This project contributes to the field of expanded photography, specifically 21st century photography as described by Rubinstein 2015 on the Photographers Gallery blog. The works utilize photogrammetry, a technique for building 3D models from photographs, and the point-cloud file format to represent 3D space. Practitioners include ScanLAB and Forensic Architecture. Writing in a landscape architecture context in Architecture and Naturing Affairs (2020), Girot coined the term ‘cloudism’ to indicate the “conceptual shift in aesthetic representation brought about by new digital tools and methods”.

CONTRIBUTION
This project comprised four photographic works exhibited as video loops on four separate rooms. It engages with themes of interiority and renegotiated childhood remembrance of an isolated regional community on the NSW Bulga Plateau.The project contributes insight into a unique culture of DIY building as a process of evolving incomplete and idiosyncratic cubby houses. It innovated remote fieldwork techniques in the context of the 2020 pandemic. Due to closed borders, the works were co-created using photographs taken by members of the Elands community sent to Melbourne on an external hard-drive. Rather than the making process being a private encounter between artist-researcher and site, this approach led to an unexpected sense of shared ownership, an enriched expanded encounter not only with the interiors but the intertwined relationships that occupied these spaces.

SIGNIFICANCE
The works were curated into the group exhibition ‘Inside Elands’ by Dr Una Rey, University of Newcastle. The exhibition was commissioned by The Lock-Up, a state-government funded contemporary art space in Newcastle. The exhibition was accompanied by a printed catalogue with a contextualizing essay by Dr Rey. It was reviewed in ArtLink, July 2021, where Associate Professor Keri Glastonbury concluded that “its strengths were both conceptual and perceptual, a tantalising microhistory which also resonated with broader socio-cultural epochs”.