Madeline Bishop is a Melbourne based artist whose work is conceptually centred around relational dynamics. Exploiting the persistent tension between distance and closeness in photographs, Bishop’s work uses a performative and constructed approach to dissecting the relationship between photography and intimacy.

For Ten strangers, Bishop asked ten people to be photographed together. Though these subjects were all known to the artist, they were strangers to each other. Their instruction was to press together, as if they were dough expanding and morphing to make themselves fit into a rectangle bread tin. Bishop photographed the scene over and over, revealing minute changes over time. As the session progressed, bodies settled into the nooks of each other’s bodies, and found new spaces to press against. Photographing in this way pushes the element of time to the forefront of what it means to make a portrait. Making portraits means trying to capture an organic, always changing thing. The subjects' feelings of comfort and discomfort ebb and flow. How people relate to others is in constant flux, even if we don’t notice the minuteness of the changes ourselves.

Curator | Angela Connor, MAPh Senior Curator

MAPh exhibition space, the Atrium Gallery, provides emerging artists with an opportunity to showcase their practice to MAPh’s audiences. The Atrium Gallery is situated between MAPh and the Wheelers Hill Library.