Awakening: embers one, last two2020
Statement: In Awakening McGlennon presents native Australian birds as heroic survivors of the bushfires, displaying themselves triumphantly against bare landscapes and brooding, cloudy skies. They are romantic figures: as indomitable as the earth itself, as proud as soldiers who have won a victory over a deadly enemy.
It was a tenet of Romanticism that the regeneration of nature symbolised the need for a broader spiritual regeneration. Nature was revered as an antidote to the spiritual desolation of an age seduced by materialist and rationalist thinking, and despoiled by the industrialism of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’.
McGlennon is an admirer of romantic art, particularly the landscapes of JMW Turner, whose glowering skies are emulated in these photographs. The Romantics saw birds as symbols of freedom and inspiration, occasionally of melancholy. Think, for instance, of the over-sized owl perched on a coffin in Caspar David Friedrich’s late ink drawing, ‘Landscape with grave, coffin and owl’ (1836–37). Even amid this wretchedness, plants are shooting up out of the earth in the foreground. If they appear to be weeds this reveals how Friedrich’s state of mind has poisoned his spiritual aspirations. – John McDonald
michaelreid.com.au
Also known as Giclee prints or bubble-jet prints, pigment ink-jet prints are generated by computer printers from digital or scanned files using dye-based or pigment-based inks. A series of nozzles spray tiny droplets of ink onto the paper surface in a precise pattern that corresponds to the digital image file. In dye-based prints the ink soaks into the paper, whereas in pigment-based prints the ink rests and dries on top of the paper surface.
Whilst the term is broad, pigment ink-jet prints have come to be associated with prints produced on fine art papers. They are the most versatile and archival method of printing available to photographers today. A wide variety of material on which an image can be printed with such inks are available, including various textures and finishes such as matte photo paper, watercolour paper, cotton canvas or pre-coated canvas.
