Photograph on paper

Signed certificate of authenticity.

Release is a multiple-exposure photograph produced during a Bundanon Trust artist residency in late 2019. The photograph is a blend of five exposures merged in camera by an algorithm that removes the darker parts of the source images.

While in residence at Bundanon, I found the place to be beautiful and serene yet I experienced the environment as somewhat unsettled. The site — in turn European farmland, cottage retreat and artist residence — has been much altered over time since Western colonisation and is still undergoing architectural transformations. Bushfires were a constant threat during my stay and I found myself working against a backdrop of warnings from the media, reports on bushfire devastation in other parts of the state and comments from politicians on how to address the issue.

Being at Bundanon at the time felt like living in a time and place of change. In response to my own conflicted impressions of the site, and in a bid to reset what it meant to me, I used my camera to capture a variety of things around my cottage by pressing the shutter button at random and letting the camera combine images into a multiple-exposure photograph. The result is a haphazard mash-up of the things that surrounded me then. An attempt to reveal all those things, including the ones I wished not to see, and, hopefully, a licence to imagine them differently.