Shell 1 (Newborn)

This work belongs to a series of work originally exhibited in Equivalence at AIRspace Projects in Sydney in 2020. You can read more about the exhibition here.

The exhibition Equivalence is made up of three parts, small paintings, photographs, and large paintings, all of which stem from feelings around my late mother, who died in 2019.

I have a habit of collecting clothing. Old, ornate, sentimental or special in some way. I’ve always had a fascination with fabric. As a child Mum would cut up her old dresses to make mine, and I loved to see photographs of her wearing those old dresses – one of many matrilineal links between us. She used to tell me stories of her life in a small Queensland city during and after World War 2. The socialising, the balls she used to attend, the ball dresses she’d wear. She kept some of those dresses in a large bag in the store room under our house and a couple of times she let me play with them, admiring the prints, the full skirts and the sheer volume of all that fabric. One day they were thrown out. Apparently, a rat had made a nest in the bag so that was the end of that. But not to be put off, their memory lived on in my head regardless. My relationship with memory and clothing had well and truly been established.

Mum kept special pieces in an old Chinese carved camphor wood chest. Three of these garments are photographed for the exhibition. I photographed the clothing two years prior and liked the results although something felt wanting. I decided, after Mum’s death, to use a pinhole camera to do the job, and after some trial and error, found the resulting images entirely in keeping with the atmosphere I was trying to achieve. Sometimes you just can’t go past good old (expensive) analogue. The Shell photographs refer to enclosure, protection, a skin or a membrane, as much as social expectations.