 Welcome to the CAS inaugural professorial lecture series. This lecture series is an opportunity for us as a college to welcome new members of our professoriate. So I'm Anne Evans, I'm the Associate Dean of Research for CAS and I'm delighted this afternoon to introduce Professor Denise Ferris. Denise is certainly not new to our college. She's been a photography lecturer since the late 80s and the head of the now School of Art and Design since 2013. During this time Denise has led the school through many changes, changes to curriculum, the establishment for the Centre for Art History and Art Theory and repositioning the school and rebranding the school with the inclusion of design in its primary mission. Denise's photographs are held in many Australian public collections and in museums internationally. This record of leadership and scholarship has resulted in promotion to Professor Lake last year. So congratulations Denise. So today Professor Ferris will introduce us to her photographic work and to the ideas and questions generated by her photographic practice. Thank you Anne. I also acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians and pay my respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. I am a photographer and my research is practice led. As a researcher I also write about representation usually on the practice of other photographers and artists who have visualised the maternal relationship. I am an academic who advocates for the cultural sector and its associated disciplines. That advocacy brings both immense pleasure and predictable pain. At the centre of my visual art practice is the articulation of loss and losing. That isn't as sad as it sounds. The things you can't keep, the ephemeral things that change the weather, emotions, relationships are potential grists for the loss mill. Remember though, for something to be a loss it must matter. I'm interested in things that matter. Sometimes loss is also a simple human activity and then that's sensitivity to change. I've explored losing or its sense of losing in myriad ways. As part of my doctoral research making UV exposed casing photographs, milk prints I visualised diverse aspects of the maternal relationship examining connection, ambivalence, fragility in today's perspective on motherhood. You have to see my website, DeniseFerris.com to look at those images and that whole set of research. We don't have time for that. I'm looking at one small section of my practice today. I do, as I said, continue to investigate photography's power in representation focusing on a long maternal photographic lineage of amateur and professional intentions from the 19th century to recent photographs. This work usually text not image continues to be important research to me and I present that research at conferences and when I can publish. Amazingly though, I can trace my lines of thought and the logic of my research through all my work the maternal landscape, the land, snow, ocean the transcendent and the real the constructed and the realistic and I hope to do this for you today. Once upon an island of white an archive, my archive. Part elegy in the face of uncertainty my work celebrates an island of snow already retreating. While photography is at core elegiac as Susan Sontag notes in this shrinking ecosystem photographs of snow summon thoughts of a faltering climate capricious and uncontrollable just looking at snow we recognize a force that will be spent in the contemporary world depictions of snow or ice envisage future or imminent crisis while my photographs describe a geographical and social locality singular and unique I broker an alliance with the oppositional aesthetic and conceptual properties of the natural and the constructed an uneasy alliance and an uncertain future I offer an account of place this account is not summative but builds possibilities with photographs as pieces of evidence in series and in sets not as one iconic image but building and building in this making and constructing ideas worth is recorded and granted through the attention that I award the image perhaps more akin to the street photograph these photographs are landscape of a kind though not wild places, wilderness or customary views which picture the natural in the absence of the cultural here in perishes snow field is a work of wild weather and of corporate instrumentality of meteorological chance and opportunistic development a fusion of monumentality and banality my photographs lend aesthetic credence to the sight of a resort's introduced manufactured infrastructure crucial to my intentions the resort is photographed as a working landscape where labour and leisure actively exist clearly side by side the human use of place emanates from the landscapes not simply spaces for distanced viewing and observation but places of human activity and joy through picturing the desperate engagements with this sight of Parrish Valley I claim a middle ground I claim a shared space here I tread a conceptual fine line while consciously evading the epic sublime of the distrandonscent landscape snow that is nature intersects with the built environment that is culture offering a pictorial opportunity and also a potential aesthetic abyss in the contest between content and form the mountain of course the ski resort has traditionally epitomised the sublime as the monumental but it is imposing weather in these photographs rather than an imposing mountain range that suggests the fearful sublime of monumental nature, capital N an elemental force unpredictable in its outcomes here weather is essential to shifting experience and renewal the national park itself is a cultural site a modern urbanite phenomena neither culture or nature nowhere more so than in this alpine area a national park which encircles ski resorts all Australian ski resorts of course are in national parks my aesthetic subjectivity and my belonging to this place is displayed in their book Landscape as Photograph Jussam and Lynne Crosscock discuss photographs as mighty indicators of cultural assumptions and I quote in Landscape Photography implicit or explicit ideas about nature art and the practice photography inextricably combined the choice of scenes, the treatment of aspects of the phenomenological world as the source for images the inclusion or exclusion of persons the suppression of detail or the stress on pure form the conscious or unconscious imitation of musical painting the hard edge fact of the diffuse visual all are the outcomes in Landscape Photography of ideologies unquote I could never reconcile my strongly held political and social views with the apparent benign beauty of my landscape photographs but Gail Jones the Australian writer has a view that opens up a possibility and she recognized this and I quote for grounding aesthetic experience as a kind of political act and as having the potential to think about the past and future in different ways art is a resource for thinking and imagining different kinds of futures and for imagining the past that someone might carry end of quote snow of course is the key the core of my heart to quote Dorothy McKellar it is fundamental to the experience of land and to my enchantment with it pictorially it is a unifying arena the cold light of refinement a world banished of color as David Batchelow in chromophomia says of the tomb like current fascination for white a white where the illusion of culture without corruption can be acted out as if it was real he said however while I engage with the vision of snow as an experiential wonder I'm mindful of its commodity status in a commercial snow field coating the terrain reductively icing a heavily utilized groomed conditioned landscape snow serves as the common link between disparate interests and snow is the mainstay of all social relations here I want viewers to inhabit my awe but observe the common ground and recognize their claim also to belonging to this place the act of photographing reinforces my belonging Robert Adams observes we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are in return we are giving something perfect a sense of inclusion our subject thus redefines us and is part of the biography by which we want to be known that definition impacts on my practice and what I want others to know I establish an intermediate space of understanding through these photographs not a visual archive of destruction as Liz Wells observes is a familiar response to the consequences of human invasion on the landscape neither are they the heroic sublime of uncontaminated landscape by integrating these dominant visual forces in my photographs I forge a middle ground which is most significantly not without power or without hope determined to demarcate a space in between extremes and the version of this landscape through photographs as experience and in the context of a large consumer enterprise it remains a shared space in claiming a middle space I am unwilling to valorize the mountain itself as sublime or venerate the physicality required of skiing it is part of my disavowal of interpretations traditional to sites such as the ski resort and the landscape mountain access to this snow experience and belonging to place is not the sole province of the mountain climber or the hardened adventurer my work does not require a boy's own adventure snow camping a huge physical achievement big ordeals while I cross country ski around this space and utilize the mountain I photograph activities that claim the site for all comers to experience physical and emotional access to this place ski tracks adjacent to Norwegian cities this series is called navigations my photographs reveal a sustained process of encounter and immersion a material setting to transcend the ordinary to move amongst the quietly magnificent there the phenomenon of snow invoking the sublime not through grandeur but through the expanse of emptiness so this is a set where we look into this kind of sublime bracken and but we are also very much right next to the the urban site where you actually literally get a tram to ski these places which seems so remote or in the account with snow and it's ephemeral nature joy and sadness navigations reveals our limitations in the face of weather and nature where we are made runnable in those these close works I still time and stretch time expanding the space and positioning both the maker and the viewer as insignificant in another series called carbon confessions I collected airport floor plans from airline magazines and use them in a direct but enigmatic way these plans outline public spaces and while emblematic of air travel they also suggest a subsequent footprint and here an environmental footprint at the draft stages of working with cutouts, line, fill spaces scans, aerial views that all reference travelling I layered terrain photographs of those floor plans along the tracks where I ski my impact is represented here my air and other travel contributing to our planet's environmental changes and future challenges these ubiquitous airport spaces servicing entrance and exit record my transit and expectations of course of my continuing global access so another two series of work that I'm going to talk about here also talk about some of the things that I've I've just discussed this is part of a small series normally called oceans although most of my work doesn't tend to have titles then it's about another kind of sublime immersion I guess you would say so another concern is also the issue of whether art and making art about so called warming about global climate about change can actually alter things so I read a paper that was at land dialogues and some of the the work here was in an exhibition that was a refereed publication that's just been published and it was called beauty as a warning so a cautious oh I'll just show you sorry this is from an exhibition that Ruth Waller and I have in Taiwan and this is just a bit quirky this is a set of dancers who interpreted my work you can see them in the space of some of my work was one of the strangest moments you will ever encounter and it was they were a set of dancers what was interesting about it so they kind of did this dance and you can see they were kind of ripping up that sort of ticket tape and then the young woman got changed from a black costume into a white costume and this was the end of the dance and it was like that is a very interesting cultural experience that we had and so I had to put that in because I came across and when I was looking for images anyway there were other amazing things about that cultural experience like having big bouquets of flower that you got to wore and flowers at the entrance to the exhibition etc in exceptional hospitality in Taipei okay so beauty as a warning a cautious government estimate predicts Australia's ski areas could be completely bare of natural winter snow by 2050 the site of the original Kuziasko hotel whose grand slam ski run was the first commercial ski slope in snowy mountains rarely now has any snow covered all in this series of work I utilise strategies necessary to undercut the viewer's expectations in the consumption of landscape photographs and question how or if representation can provoke recognition of issues I consider the tension between utilising landscape conventions in an alpine environment let's face it tricky snow think glitter Christmas cards and so I think about challenging those conventions while still towing that fine line and utilising them so I think about the aesthetics of snow the romantic sublime of course and I think about that in terms of bringing a focus to climate change every landscape reveals human actions and their values and while my winter photographs manifest concern about this fragile climate fragile climatic environment sustainability these photographs also significantly foreground human activity and pleasure I visually broker an alliance with the oppositional aesthetic and conceptual properties of the natural and the constructed the results use of snow as a commodity and the diverse human use of place emanate from my photographs as a shared emotional investment public depictions of this shared space are crucial in my view to the recognition of the extraordinary natural asset now significantly at high risk realising photographs of this astonishing, vanishing and unstable landscape my approach is to parlay beautiful but restrained photographs to deliver undesirable truths and considerations expecting to arouse feelings and to harness effect my goal is refined environmental propaganda so refined in fact I acknowledge that it can just go right over your head confronting our instinctive response to the traditions of landscape and beauty can our consumption of aestheticised landscape be undercut to reveal some urgent realities and that's without stacking a didactic slogan across it without maybe with using titles but without being deeply didactic with just giving you the image to consider can the sublime aesthetic of snow and its aestheticised landforms be repurposed in their consumption and strategically utilise to address environmental urgencies what Sontag does say rather wisely in my view is I quote a work of art so far as it is a work of art cannot whatever the artist's personal intention advocate anything at all end of quote I tend to agree it can't of in itself but it can certainly make you think about the questions as I said in my abstract that you read before coming to this talk so another series of work the beautiful failures of photography that I'll talk about is called Celestial Spaces where I actually take kind of representation's lack head on the solo exhibition Celestial Spaces was shown in Pingyao, China and in Chyanda, New South Wales where the images were made and this body of work addresses the missing narratives of the Chinese gold miners who lived and worked at Chyanda in the 1860s in Celestial Spaces 10 large-scale paired photographs consider photography's incapacity to offer significant understanding of the historical and social narratives of place and I see this as photography's beautiful failure the weather and the landscape are also introduced as characters in my account in a broader identity context Simon Pugh makes the point about landscapes' symbolic uses and I quote landscape in recent years has stood as a surrogate for more politicised notions of nationhood a displaced expression of sentiments of attachment which are denied expression elsewhere and as a source of spiritual strength a moral therapy end of quote think about the mining companies and the big expanses centre expanses and a whole range of things the landscape gets to sell our idea of nationhood quite strongly the irony about Chyandra is it has a rather more complicated history and there's a heroic history to Chyandra as well where people went there in mind but it was a rather more mixed ethnicity than is currently acknowledged the landscape photographs of this series maybe recognises Australian and assume a coherent uninterrupted Australian identity however this attribution of a sole hermetic identity is disrupted by the existence of the residual handmade landforms and discernible landmarkings pictured so these creeks some of those mounds that you see are some of the things that you can see there the landscape images concentrate on sites that were the working and living spaces of Chinese miners in the 19th century the material evidence pictured the macro image you see are the residue of objects touched and used by the miners in daily life and these were excavated in fact from these sites by the archaeologists of ANU the title spaces suggest just that gaps in our interpretation and only the image acquired through all the accumulated evidence provided in the images in the first photograph in each diptych are images of the sites where the miners worked the partner photographs are the shards or sheds depending on which discipline you come from of ceramic bowls, cups, pipes and pots unearthed as I said over two digs by ANU students and staff two ways of looking the view and the close-up disparate perspectives formally reconciled in fact essentially forced together there's a mismatch in their content and formal continuity a designed mismatch the gap cannot be bridged through social knowledge that we currently have and that knowledge holds only sparse recorded details of the daily lives of men who lived on these pictured sites while my photographs acknowledge the Chinese miners presence and contribution to Kiandra's place in history these images display the photographs ineffectiveness in the transmission of certain understandings photographs fail the series outcome was evident when I was working with it in that complex physical and historical landscape the limits of photography to recount the biographies, histories and narratives was clear the work therefore drew on the attention pointing attention to the limits of photography's capacity to go beyond acknowledgement its inability to move to understanding without additional information the series construction made clear this confounding misalignment where it appears formally come together but actually doesn't quite the spaces in our knowledge questions not answers would be the staple feature of these photographs nevertheless the joint photographs draw attention to the subject matter bored and unexplained juxtaposed uncomfortably these images still exist I would say suggest argue to raise awareness in view of the efforts by this photographic series to represent absence with evidence I considered how the photographs of celestial spaces really did foreground mostly as I said the failures of photography the medium alerting alerting us in fact to its own lack this somewhat contradictory situation is that realistic landscapes and ceramic hard evidence should offer more rather than depict their own lack of capacity to deliver while photographs are powerful as we see we acknowledge both their impact and their limitations in this series they do not always hold the answers but they're good as I say in posing questions Celestial Spaces was published as a folio at the British Museum's Anthropology and Photography Conference and it's also still on the RA RAI site as a Victoria Research portfolio I developed the research I talked at the Labor Migration Conference and the Visible Evidence Conference and many others to attract discovery project collaborators and in fact we did put in a discovery project twice written like in I wouldn't say five minutes but far too hastily and I really hope that we can eventually get this up when there's some research time available who knows as a linkage grant still with collaborators from archaeology one of whom is here today and others from history and oral history etc across the college so that would be really great just that research time whoever's out there the last work that I'll talk about is actually published in a monograph but published as text done with images and I'm sort of going to quote for some of the texts that I wrote but it also comes from the site of Perisher Valley but it was much more about a kind of personal connection to that place of pleasure in an Australian snow field and it's called conspicuous consumption photographs of pleasure and loss personal and public in an Australian snow field the work examined the necessity and the implications of my ongoing motivation to photograph the winter and melt landscapes of Perisher it's actually quite close to where I live when I don't live here my continuing witness to this landscape and the land site is manifestly associated with concerns about the future of this fragile environment an environment just formed by seasonal weather however the constancy of my interest in this site identifies my strong association with this place the intensity of my raptor tension surveying the area like a flannous demonstrates the sense of belonging as well as continuing search for resolution and definition while these photographs are apparently cool and formal there is an emotional pitch to these white landscapes and the effective manner in which white is parlayed I've always considered snow as pure ground a reductive sway however I now envisage this homogeneous tone as a conspicuous trope that makes the landscapes open open and accessible this is I see an emotional accessibility the openness of white the landscape here is not merely a cipher for narrative but rather intends to recreate the enthralled experience of the witness so the few images that I've chosen from this monograph are kind of just emblematic of different groupings that we put those images on different pages under these photographs are not constructed but left completely unaltered relayed as they were as they are here and now without sensationalism or extravagance so my published text read in part pleasure quote Liz Wells landscape real and imagined contributes to our sense of identity subjectivity and collectivity end of quote weather vane so the winter landscapes of Perish Valley in the context of climate change manifest concern so as I said my first intention is nominal environmental propaganda a celebratory if cautionary tale about this site but time haunts the series the vision of this landscape itself predicated on cycles and seasons, arcs of past to present time running out and nostalgia homesickness for a tentative future undercover moving decades ago from a city to Perisha where fortuitously the one pub had an unused room I set up a makeshift dark room there I made sun prints sardonically titling the series mountains of fun which was the resort company then a packer company actually Kerry was still in residence then then a packer company advertising slogan it's now owned by an American company actually Perish Valley the series used that I made then mountains of fun used aboriginal tribal maps of the mountains explorers diary extracts and scientific data with smaller scale images of vistas and views years later I made home ground landscapes about the same area and in the article that I wrote for this monograph I wrote much about home and about finding a sense of home and where home tends to be and how you actually come to being for example when you're young you can't wait to leave I grew up in Brisbane and at a certain point I was pretty keen to get out of there and I love going back there now but when I came back from London after living there for some years in Brisbane at the time I was young now I love going back there has no other kind of claim on me except that it is home so in this series I talk very much through the writing about about finding home and coming to a resolution with the the packer owned resort that we all ski in Tobogganis demarcating this place I refuse photographic definitions that come about from dominant interests the ski corporation or the state authority overseeing development while this photography in Parrish Valley is not an overtly political act it is informed by ideology as I mentioned before with Jocelyn Lindworth Koch article about ideology and landscape embodied understanding and critically my belief in revealing the periphery as meaningful inform my photographs in between the land, landscape and its used just as citizenship is to be part of something larger attached to a larger group by definition whatever concept of the contested term citizen one subscribes to if there are any sociologists here belonging is in relation to a larger picture that picture I've come to appreciate maps gender class and equity home where no fact is isolate my figures are brugal like representing everyone but this fondness is not a feeling of pastoral reminiscence these figures show the present and suggest the future necessity of social and ethnic diversity in this place while snow is a commercial commodity access beyond the resort is not currently user pays so the Tobogganis the punters as I call them they kind of get there and they have a crack at skiing and they do not pay an access fee to the resort they just use it because it's there my photographs value the current pluralism and pretend a future when only certain privilege groups maybe the consumers in this place if there is no natural snow in Australia along the island of white access to commercially produced artificial snow will be very restricted only those who can afford to pay for admission to a ski field and its commerce will be participants on snow in Australia I began with a sense of loss indicating definitive transformation to the extent and appearance of snow fields through climate change the value of accessibility to this place is both emotional and practical nurturing an effective relationship between users and place is crucial to caring about consequences building a shared emotional investment through images which call attention to what we may lose and why we should care about what we may lose is my abiding empowerment commitment in my work so this segues beautifully into the other main strand of me that matters here I am an educator I realise this when I first began teaching and at the school of art I relish that experience encountering so closely the aspirations of another I thought like you my colleagues that I could make a difference when I became an associate dean I saw I could have an effect on education and outside of face-to-face teaching I wanted to change things and then I wanted to change things for our sector my desire to continue to make a difference has never wavered indeed privileged to lead the school it has found its home the school of art and design offers and continues to offer unique art and design education with strong interdisciplinary connections within ANU direct partnerships with national cultural institutions and sustained teaching and research partnerships in Asia, Canada and the US the school provides the public face largely of ANU and that recognition currently renewed has positioned me to be an effective advocate internally and externally for the school and its associated disciplines moving across these fields university practitioner based and the public is crucial to our strategic relationships and crucial to our success our connections have both felt influence for sure and had influence for sure other disciplines want to collaborate to use our teaching models our expertise and to share in our research we have influenced other disciplines across campus practice led research has gathered respect and greater understanding in most quarters the school of art and design has an enhanced capacity to have meaningful collaboration with other disciplines and we firmly believe this is important generating and maintaining networks and collaborations between the ANU art makers, designers organisations and institutions in significant strategic alliances and international levels does count and of course we are educators and while some days it can feel fatiguing we are intent on spreading our beliefs our beliefs about the value of making and creativity our beliefs about data and materials and our beliefs about the value of history, theory and publication there has been a substantial growth in our school changes to curriculum as Anne said generously before and degree offerings we've established innovations we've addressed digital cultures and end user engagement these new programs do expand who we are as a school articulating with our traditional past as well as our transformation a transformation which is to integrate highly relevant established practices not to do away with them it is a powerful encouragement to watch our school adapt flexibly to the challenging and ever changing environments that we face to respond to the sector's dynamic challenges in education and research breaking down discipline barriers and promoting the School of Art and Design sustainability we do challenge and have challenged aspects of traditional art culture I make no apology that is what artists have always done they have challenged the status quo and so it should be we must examine and continue to examine things committed to innovation and growth with the design degree masters and other developments such as building the center for our history and art theory maintaining the health of all our disciplines we have instigated a highly collegiate transition to a viable contemporary art and design school of the 21st century and that is making a difference thank you I'm always intrigued by looking at your work and the absolute whiteness and the sublime whiteness of colour and I sort of look at the colour like there might be people in a skeething or an orange fence or something but then even the ones that don't have colour in the white sort of becomes colour and I'd like you to talk about colour there's something about colour that is in here okay well there's a whole series that wasn't in there called the colour of snow and I suppose that white ground it's a no brainer really you don't have to be a good colourist although I am very interested in colour oddly enough I'm interested in the subtleties of colour I suppose but against that ground there are fairly evident things for example in the Australian landscape you get the khaki grass and then you get that against white or you know it's kind of it's kind of you know look I have written about colour even with my casein work which is white it was super white when I first sort of discovered that as a process and made my milk prints casein prints white they actually don't come out white traditionally but I've got a kind of way to make them white and the whites were of a different range and I became really obsessed about this white and I would pull them out of my dark room my partner Ken and he'd say ah they're disappearing I was like you can't see what's in there I'm like good and so they became you know they were really really fragile and they were meant to be that was a series called Given Grace and then the next series I made I pumped up a certain chemical secret and they became beige and that suited my schema well because it was called Home Decorum and it was kind of about the tastefulness of beige and the kind of the holding the line the domestic line in the home and the tastefulness of not introducing any of those naughty, rude not tasteful colours and so that was kind of became beige and I did a lecture here once actually about that work called Going Back and Going Beige and so I was pulling this fine line about the white but always conscious of that colour fine line so the colours that pop in these it's pretty easy to make a colour pop with a white round like that I suppose but it's true I am interested in the colour and you know what snow is it's just frozen bits of water and depending on the light coming through it so really my colour that you see here is really not about colour it's about light and so everything for me is about light and so the light comes through those little frozen up bits and it makes it green or blue or mauve that's really hard to get rid of or you know all this sort of range of colours and needless to say I do really like to print my own work or at least be very close to whoever is doing so because because I do hire that very fine line about what that colour is does matter to me which white is very important you do not want to go to a paint shop with me does that help to answer your question thank you Helen Brand I shall name all the questioners you talked about how loss in one way or another is a running theme through your work is that something that you realise looking back over your body of work through the years or is that something that was consciously going to work thinking about no that is something that I in fact I think you know it's a word that pulls a whole range of things together but if I had to reduce it to that word that's what I would say and that's what I've just said no it's not something that I thought about I mean photography is lossy lossy I mean you know the minute you've taken gone so like it's very different to a painting or a print I would say in that way so you've got a bit of a head start there but you know even in the constructed images I've made you know the milk prints are well they're made from a large contact negative in UV light you know very laborious there so they're not captured as it were so they're not captured of a moment and the moment's gone they're actually made either by cutting out or other ways and so they're not photographic in that same way and yet I suggest they're still about something going missing the ephemeral and all those kinds of things so it sort of intrudes there but I don't think at that time when I was making them I was instinctively making them and it's only in retrospect that you can I think really have a very strong idea about what you're doing why the exegetical perspective on your work you know when you're younger I think is so important and I know it's hard and hurts but and I think I'd have to say I only started to see what I was doing when I did my doctoral work when I had the time to really think about why I did the things I did and what really interested me yeah thank you thank you Denise that was terrific you met in Bruegel and I'm wondering if you're conscious of working in any particular traditions either a photographic position or some other pictorial tradition because there are a number of those images for me sort of reminded me of paintings and things that I've looked at before but also photography I was looking quite recently at Frank Hurley's Antarctic photographs so I'm wondering if your snow in a sense is talking to any other images of snow that is a really interesting question Will because weirdly I think I try and not take the kinds of kinds of photographs that others have taken snow I suppose and yet it's a bit difficult given the content it's a bit difficult to wildly escape but I know what you mean I think for example in earlier I think in a way that I am careful of I think my work is connected to pictorialism and that can be a bit scary because it can sort of fall over the edge of you know pictorialism you know the fuzzy wuzzy school things as the heart edge photographers called it but I think it is connected to pictorialism I think it's soft in some of those ways without being a sort of a soft you know lens people always telling me it's a really beautiful bright day you know you're going out skiing and you know it's really good for photography today I'm thinking no and I leave the camera behind and I just go for a ski yeah there's no way in the world yeah but then the bad weather comes on yeah you know my cameras are small enough that you can put them in warm places when you're skiing because you know obviously the digital cameras freeze instead of film cameras in the cold so I think pictorialism amazingly and I think pictorialism connects my constructed work the KCM work which you can all see on my website and again that fuzzy wuzzy sort of school which was you know just a bridge too far some years ago but you know now that's okay so yes I think and I and I think sometimes I want to say hard things but I'm very happy to say them in a soft way and I took the image out which was God Jewel which was you know happy who can speak Norwegian happy something which was a little snow covered glittery kind of card that I put in this because I think that tension with snow and sentimentality is a real fine line that you walk yeah yes thanks to news could you say a little more about that Taiwan exhibition and the experience of the dancers I could keep you here all afternoon did you set that up or was it a spontaneous response by the performance oh it was I hope I don't make you all ill by going back through this sort of like too fast it was it was we didn't know it was going to happen Ruth and I arrived at the opening and we had no idea and then we were introduced to these young performers and at the opening and there was this very formal opening and we were wearing our corsages there was a four piece traditional little orchestra wasn't there and our speeches and then this started we saw these young performance were introduced and then they sort of started doing this kind of performance and we were like whoa no one had a discussion with us I certainly didn't set it up it was kind of like Ruth and I were just trying not to look at each other at the time actually we were like wow that's amazing because it's just something it's something so unusual that would just never happen here and it would certainly never happen without discussion with the artist one and also we don't have a school of performing arts I mean and for a whole range of other reasons which I won't say on camera but they were the most but they were dead serious as you can see and kind of all and the ticket type stuff was kind of I was like trying to capture it was sort of flying around wasn't it Ruth can you yeah yeah but the chain then at the end wow that was like that was like holy smokes what's going on here I was reminded of you know going to art school in Sydney we had performance nights you know mostly that meant people with their kit off you know and so I thought oh oh here we go this is type A no surely that's not going to happen I thought any minute wow but that wasn't going to happen and yeah and they were really intense and it was kind of in relation to this set of works so I showed we both showed a lot of work in that exhibition and I showed this is just one room none of these images these are actually squirts but yeah they decided to do it in there was it was really amazing no no Ruth got the orchestra lucky all of you and and I got the dances in black and blue I know and it was and yeah it was it was pretty like it's it's just great when I came upon them I'm like oh yeah I'd forgotten all about that that's it's kind of marvellous from a distance now it was just a little bit unusual at the time you know sort of a cultural I nearly said bridge but I mean divide really and sort of you know as you know those people are incredibly hospitable and just you know really go the whole hog as you can see yeah some and then sort of this standing up sort of and there was a lot of kind of earnest wasn't there with a lot of earnest kind of looking and sort of giving the word the dignity that no I don't know it's like no they kind of no they weren't they kind of live with them and and then we're sort of synthesizing their um response I think no they were kind of in fact they were keeping well away from oh no a few times they came awfully close to the photographs didn't they yeah they moved around they sort of were flung about quite a bit and um but they didn't directly go up to any individual image they were sort of communicating with each other yeah no no and I've just chosen I mean there were more of them from what I could um pretty low light as you can see but then they stood up against the photographs and did this amazing but her changing from the black to the white was amazing it was like wow lovely lovely young people and very very generous hosts as you'd be aware hello you oh pardon me if you want to talk about something other than the dancers I'll move to another image it's about your titles you know you seem um very invested in the titles and that verbal aspect of your work I just wondered if that's something that you've always done you know there seems to be a very strong poetic connection between the titles and the works themselves is that something that has always been present in your work or is it something you've developed you know as you I think it is something that I've that's always been present I title a series I never title an individual image it's always untitled hard for curators untitled one untitled two untitled you know up to 20 I think the names of things you know for me they are important you know home day quorum you know a work on the status quo it's like starts to give you a kind of an indication of where we're going with this you know investment one of my casing series is a series of five images large and they are just a sort of a wrap sheet but wrapped around different bodies you know from birth to sort of death I suppose investment so it's kind of this sacred kind of relationship I suppose so yeah they're a little bit that I certainly do want to suggest something in those titles but I don't want to suggest that in each image and again early on I saying that my account of whatever I'm trying to communicate is summative so I'm building I'm building this kind of idea from a series of images from a series of facts if you like or evidence or and I guess the title kind of nails it but I refuse to have each image this is what this is of you know that for me is not how I want to nail it down I want to nail down the idea but I never want to nail down the image if you can see that that's a different thing yeah that's very important thank you Thanks Miss Did you become interested in tracing these landscapes before you were concerned about climate change and have you ever been and or do you have any interest in going to Antarctica Yes I'd love to go to Antarctica I get really seasick but I know you can fly there now or very close to there but yes I'd love to go there and to the last one and I've had an interest in this landscape since as I said I grew up in Brisbane when I first went there when I was about 16 I have never forgotten the austere treeless plane on top of this red bow chairlift never and it's to my just a set of circumstances that I ended up living where I live when I don't live here so the series that I've made but they've nearly always it's how they've ever been straight landscape that set of images I made called home ground was the straightest black and white work the national park actually owns that now that's probably the most straight but they're not straight landscapes either there are more details in the landscape before that the brown prints I made that I talked about before called mountains of fun they were as I said they took you know an indigenous maps and other things and pulled them all together in these again printouts they're not straight photographs like you take a photograph they're a construction of photographs it's a bit hard to explain it's a contact process but I made those you know the high country of Australia in particular is radically important to Aboriginal people like it has a line from there to the middle of Australia it is a very important place it's a very important place the boondigan way from there to the coast and Aboriginal people have always come back and visited the high country so I'm sort of conscious of that when I first got there I arrived in Perish Valley from Johannesburg actually and to get a job for a while and from going there I've always been kind of interested in first of all the landscape but not through landscape photography but more about the kinds of ideas of what went on in that land use