In 2018 to accompany the Bowness Photography Prize exhibition, MGA launched an annual exhibition series to showcase and explore the practice of a past winner or finalist. This initiative provides MGA with the opportunity to support, profile and champion past Bowness Photography Prize finalists and invites audiences to delve into their practice in more detail.

Leah King-Smith is both a previous Bowness Photography Prize finalist and an MGA collection artist. King-Smith is a Queensland-based artist with a photographic practice extending across three decades. This exhibition presents the series Dreaming Mum again which includes King-Smith’s Bowness Photography Prize work from 2018. This series depicts the artist’s mother placed back into the context of her ancestral lands through King-Smith's signature process of layering photographs.

This is a stylistic return for King-Smith, whose 1991 series Patterns of connection is widely recognised and has been exhibited extensively both in Australia and overseas. Her practice explores ideas of identity and how they can shift over time. King-Smith’s practice pushes beyond conventional boundaries of photography to propose ideas of cultural agency and interconnectedness.

Curators: Pippa Milne and Gareth Syvret