In celebration of the gallery’s 30th anniversary, MGA commissioned four leading Australian artists to explore the City of Monash by responding to key issues facing the local community. Peta Clancy, Lee Grant, Ponch Hawkes and David Rosetzky were invited to respond to a topic of their choosing.
Exploring the topic of homelessness, Hawkes produced her series Lay down your head. To create this series Hawkes spoke to women in the community who have experienced homelessness. She responded to their experiences by making work about places where they had found shelter and made their homes. As they recounted their stories, Hawkes noted down key phrases that reflected their experiences of being homeless. The photographs, each captioned with a sentence, are both reconstructions and documentations of moments in these women's lives. They work in concert with each other to capture something of the transience, vulnerability, fragility and uncertainty inherent in not having a safe space for themselves or their family members.
(2021)
Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
