LOCATION: Landskrona Foto, Tyghuset. MAP. Included in festival ticket
The work of Ying Ang, Miriam Charlie, Odette England, and Lisa Sorgini is united by a shared exploration of place, family, care and mothering. Their images respond to recent personal and collective experiences, framed by the society, history, and unique landscape of Australia. While concentrating on intimate moments of tenderness, touch and connection, they confront wider concepts around the unseen or unacknowledged experiences of women, girls and mothers.
Central to the exhibition is Ying Ang’s ‘The Quickening’, a layered body of work, combining images from baby monitors, and photographs taken by Ang on cameras and phones. The series considers the transformational experience of pregnancy and early motherhood, which includes reflection on postpartum depression and anxiety. Moments of exhaustion, tedium, and ache are juxtaposed with images infused with love and wonder, revelling in the connection between mother and child; an experience she describes as the colliding of ‘xcruciating fear and dominating love’. 1 .As Ang reflects, ‘The Quickening’ ‘interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life’. Through this work, Ang centres these narratives, in a response to the lack of resources or public discussion around the postpartum experience. (1 Joanna Creswell, ‘These Intimate Photos Show The Reality Of Postpartum Depression’, Refinery29, 18 February 2022,)
Like Ang, Lisa Sorgini’s series ‘Behind Glass’ brings attention to women’s experiences of motherhood and care. ‘Behind Glass’ was produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when large areas of Australia faced severe lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. Sorgini frames this collective experience through the personal, domestic space. Mothers, carers and children are photographed in their homes, captured through, or rather, behind glass. This enabled Sorgini to work while adhering to social distancing guidelines. When routines and institutions around schooling and nursery were absent because of the pandemic, women shouldered far greater levels of responsibility and care. While ‘Behind Glass’ concentrates on this unique moment in history, the series reflects Sorgini’s wider practice which focuses on the unrecognised but expected care given by women and mothers. Sorgini seeks to assert the importance of this care. The compositions, bathed in golden light, recall the grandeur of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Sorgini elevates her sitters and their situation, underlining the significance of their role and labour.
Drawing inspiration from her childhood, Odette England’s work visualises the underrepresented experiences of rural life. England grew up in Murray Bridge, a regional town on the outskirts of South Australia. The town is desolate, hot, and dusty, the dust featuring a unique pink hue. There, England’s family owned a dairy farm, and the milking schedule and needs of the cows dominated their lives. In ‘Dairy Character’, England chronicles and reflects on her personal experience and family life through imagery drawn from her family’s archive and a cow manual owned by her father. The graphic nature of the manual enforces England’s comparison between the objectification of women and dairy cows. But her work is also concerned with the wider marginalisation of girls and women in rural culture. This marginalisation is at odds with the centrality of women’s fertility and milking as part of the dairy farming business which dominates much of the southern Australian countryside.
Miriam Charlie’s ‘Getting to Borroloola’ is similarly tied to Australia’s landscape, and the experience of country. Produced in the wake of the pandemic, the series documents her experience of returning to home, country and family following the lifting of controls and borders. She states, ‘These photos capture me getting back to my Country after time spent in Covid isolation. I wanted to document how it felt being free again – and reconnecting with my family and Country.’ The series was taken during the seven-hour journey from Darwin to Charlie’s small hometown of Borroloola, located in Australia’s Northern Territory. The journey, along dry, desert-land and endless highways, speaks to Australia’s harsh landscape. But through Charlie’s lens, the landscape is transformed: her photographs capture moments of joy and play, and overflow with love for family and the excitement of returning home.
Catlin Langford, curator Centre for Contemporary Photography
A Centre for Contemporary Photography exhibition
