MAPh X Artist photography auction

For over three decades Rod McNicol’s photographic practice has concentrated on portraiture. His approach to the genre is structured and consistent, with his subjects almost always photographed staring back at the camera against neutral backgrounds. McNicol asks his subjects to pause and stare into the camera, with the intention of capturing portraits that function as witnesses to the inescapable passing of time.

McNicol studied photography at Prahran College in 1974, where he was part of a now-highly significant generation of young photographers who were taught by Athol Shmith, Paul Cox and John Cato. He was actively involved in the photography scene that emerged in Melbourne at this time, and established the Photographers Gallery in South Yarra with John Williams and Ingeborg Tyssen. McNicol began taking portraits at this time and, like many portrait photographers of his generation (Carol Jerrems, Ponch Hawkes, Sue Ford), focused on his friends and acquaintances as a means of celebrating personal connections with his everyday milieu. He continues this approach to this day.

McNicol has at times turned his attention away from the human face, to document changing cloud patterns, weathered gravestones and layers of graffiti. However, these bodies of work only serve to illuminate is primary interest in exploring mortality and the transience of life.

Artist statement: Sometimes restrictions, even quite severe ones, can prove to be fortuitously advantageous. This seems to have been the case for me of late. Two degenerative eye diseases and a chronic respiratory condition have seriously curtailed my long-term passion for photographic portraiture. My ‘portrait pilgrimage’ – as I have termed it – is as good as done.

Consequently, in facing this dilemma, I have turned to the time-honoured art of the still-life. This gives me the freedom to work in a slower, less pressured, more contemplative manner. With a glance back over my shoulder, I have taken inspiration from the golden age of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting and the work of Adriaen Coorte in particular.

- Rod McNicol

This work was shortlisted for the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize. McNicol's work is held within MAPh's collection and MAPh presented a solo exhibition Rod McNicol: memento mori which was accompanied by a major exhibition catalogue. Works by McNicol held within MAPh's collection will be exhibited as part of MAPh's ground-breaking exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968–1981) (1 March – 25 May 2025).

Michael Corridore’s practice is multidisciplined and includes photography, directing film content and more recently scoring music for motion projects.

Over the past twenty years, his works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia, Europe and the USA, and included in public collections including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gold Coast Art Gallery, Queensland; Haggerty Museum of Art, USA, as well as private collections in Austria, Australia, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the USA.

Career highlights include winning the ‘Aperture Foundation’s Portfolio Prize and the subsequent exhibition of the ‘Angry Black Snake’, series at their New York gallery in 2010. Recently one of his works won the PHOTOBOOK Melbourne Photo Award 2016. In 2014 work from his ‘Transient’ series of abstract cityscapes were chosen for a special issue of TAR magazine curated by film director, David Lynch.

Corridore has been shortlisted four times in the Bowness Photography Prize (2013, 2022, 2023, 2024).

Artist statement: Years ago, I learned the earth’s magnetic poles were not permanent. This revelation made me think about the vulnerability of the atmosphere that sustains our planet. As a layperson, I gained an understanding of how the earth’s magnetosphere operates and provides protection against harmful solar radiation and winds, without which life as we know it cannot exist. The shifting magnetic north is evident by the drifting northern and southern lights at the earth’s extremes, shifting from Antarctica towards Australia in the southern hemisphere. While continuing to ponder the transitory nature of life on Earth, this work imagines the potential outcome of a weakened magnetosphere. This ongoing project also influences the evolution of my processes and materials that I employ.

- Michael Corridore

Naomi Hobson is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography and ceramics. She resides on the banks of the riverbeds where her grandparents were born.

Her residence is an old tin shed that was once her village church. Her colourful abstract compositions act as a link between individuality and a shared identity. Her continual inspiration is the vast traditional lands of her ancestors surrounding the town of Coen in Queensland and her culture. More recently, Naomi is further inspired by the richness of cultural diversity she witnessed first-hand while exploring village life, rural farmlands and the organised urban chaos throughout South East Asia.

Her work has been acquired by institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Shepparton Art Museum, Bendigo Art Gallery and Cairns Art Gallery, and was recently the subject of a major tapestry commission produced with the Australian Tapestry Workshop for the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Artist statement: I was intrigued by how curious these two brothers were in following dragonflies along the Coen River in the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. The insects drew the brothers along the sandbanks of the river as they played. The rainbow bee-eaters then started to swoop. It was the afternoon, and the birds were in a feeding frenzy. They were tasting the river water then feeding on the dragonflies. It was a such a spectacle for the brothers and for me.

The interrelationship between living things is seen here; it is subtle, precious and something to nurture.

- Naomi Hobson

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize, and her work is held within MAPh's collection from the series Adolescent wonderland (2019).

Michaela Gleave is an Australian artist based in Bediagal/Wangal country, Sydney. Gleave’s conceptual practice spans numerous mediums and platforms including digital and online works, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video.

Her projects question the nature of reality and our innate relationship to time, matter, and space, focusing particularly on the changing intersections between art, science, and society.

Gleave’s work has been presented extensively across Australia as well as in Germany, Greece, The United Kingdom, Austria, South Africa, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Iceland, the United States and Mexico. She has developed major performance and installation works for the MCA, Sydney; GOMA, Brisbane; Dark Mofo, Hobart; AGWA, Perth; Bristol Biennial, UK; TarraWarra Art Museum, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney; and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne among others. Gleave has been awarded residencies at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, Tokyo Wonder Site in Japan, and CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, Australia.

Artist statement: Cooks River/Goolay’yari, infrared is an ongoing photographic study of the Cooks River, Sydney. The river is named after Captain Cook, though its traditional name is thought to have been Goolay’yari, meaning ‘pelican river’. Its waters flow through the lands of the Bediagal, Wangal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation. The once beautiful river system has been heavily altered in the time since colonisation; its course has been changed, and much of the river and its feeder creeks concreted to channel 100 square kilometres of urban stormwater into Botany Bay.

Captured using a full-spectrum converted camera and infrared filter, the foliage surrounding the river is rendered ghostly pale, the chlorophyll in plants reflecting infrared in a manner similar to light on snow. These otherwise familiar landscapes take on an otherworldly cast, bringing to light the disparities between banal urban infrastructure and fecund natural growth.

- Michaela Gleave

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize, and her work was exhibited at MAPh in Stargazing (2023-24).

Lucas Davidson uses everyday office equipment such as digital cameras, scanners, computer software and printers to challenge the traditional conventions of photography through experimentations with scale, media and repetition of form. Ranging from large-scale photographic installations to environments of transparent colour, his works are not confined to a single medium but are concerned with the fundamental elements that constitute a photograph such as light, space, paper and alchemic process.

Davidson completed his Master of Fine Art at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (2012). Recent solo exhibitions include: A Picture of Health, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney (2024); Learning to let go, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney (2023); Living with Uncertainty The Lock-Up, Newcastle (2020); Casual Forces, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland (2019); Social Construct, Installation Contemporary Carriageworks, Sydney (2018).

Recent selected group exhibitions and awards include: Bowness Photography Prize, MAPh (2024), Built Photography, Museum of Australian Photography (2024); Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photo Award, HOTA, Gold Coast (2022); Light Matter, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (2019); Conscious Process, Artbank, Sydney (2018); Art OMI International Artist’s Residency, New York (2016); Digital Portraiture Award, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2016); New South Wales Visual Arts Fellowship, Artspace, Sydney (2015); Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travelling Scholarship, Sydney College of the Arts (2015); Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize, National Art School, Sydney (2015).

Artist statement: My most recent exhibition A picture of health samples other photographers’ works to evoke watery depths and endless horizons while engaging with the robust history of photography. Each work has been layered with contrasting hues and gradients to generate space within the image; the movement between surface and background aims to focus the viewer’s eye and attention.

This body of work was created over the course of a year while I was being treated for cancer. These works became part of my daily ritual, offering a place for the eye and mind to rest, while connecting with the vast reserves of health and healing that come from making and viewing art.

- Lucas Davidson

The large scale photographic installation exhibited at MAPh as part of Built Photography closely relates to this work, and uses a similar technique and colour palette, which was documented in the accompanying publication.

Angela Tiatia (Aotearoa, Australia, Sāmoa) is a contemporary artist who lives and works from Sydney, Australia. Her work explores contemporary culture, drawing out the relationships between representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of body and place. Often through the lenses of history, popular and material culture, the artist addresses themes within power structures and how these impact the individual and their communities.

Tiatia was the recipient of the 2022 Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, Australia’s most significant commissioning award for contemporary moving image art. The Dark Current was the result of this major award, and debuted at ACMI, the Australian Centre for Moving Image, in 2023. Since then, the work won the Fisher’s Ghost Award (2023), and toured both nationally and internationally, including at the Tate Modern (2024).

Tiatia’s work has been exhibited throughout the world, including the National Museum Scotland (2023); Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); The Getty Foundation Museum, CA, USA (2021); and Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2018). Tiatia represented in collections including Fonds régional d'art contemporian, France; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Australian Museum, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne.

Tiatia is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf.

Artist statement: The dark current’ is a homage to my mother, Lusi Tiatia, who passed away in early 2023. She was one of the first generation of women who migrated to the cities of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand from the villages of the Pacific Islands in the 1960s.

My sitter Cassaerea Jesus channeled my mother’s expression: strong, calm and resolute. She is unaware of the water that surrounds her, which represents the vast personal and intergenerational changes my mother endured. This retelling of my mother’s story bears the universal humanity of migrants, a people who form pearls out of bravery and sacrifice from the grit of prejudice and perseverance.

- Angela Tiatia

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize. Tiatia has been shortlisted three times in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024, 2021, 2019).

Siri Hayes predominately works with photography, video and textiles to explore personal and philosophical connections to place and human impact upon it.

Hayes was born on Boon Wurrung country and lives and works on Wurundjeri Country in northeast Melbourne. Some solo exhibitions include Back to Nature Scene at Heide Museum of Modern Art, All you knit is love at Centre for Contemporary Photography and Holding Still at Sarah Scout Presents. Her work has been curated into significant group exhibitions including Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Negotiating this World Contemporary Australian Art and Stormy weather – the landscape in contemporary Australian photography both also at the NGV, Future Primitive, Heide Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Australian Portraits, National Portrait Gallery.

Hayes’s work is held in over 20 public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, Australian Parliament House, Heide Museum of Modern Art, State Library of Victoria and MAPh amongst others.

She has lectured in the photography department at the Victorian College of the Arts since 2015 as well as working as a photography lecturer for 12 years at Monash University and 6 at Swinburne.

Hayes is a member of the Paradoxa Collective and is a recipient of the Philip Hunter Fellowship for a collaborative research project the Escarpment at Garambi Baan / Laughing Waters with InPlace Projects.

In 2024 she was a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize and the National Works on Paper at MPRG.

Artist statement: In a colour darkroom blind (no darkroom light) I scattered floral and faunal debris, including moths, butterflies, thistledown and mistletoe flowers, as well as cleaned rubbish collected while walking along the Birrarung/Yarra River in northeast Naarm/Melbourne over colour photopaper to create this largescale photogram.

The toxic haze hanging over the fictional town of Praiseworthy in Alexis Wright’s novel of the same name informed the artwork’s composition. Both this haze and ‘Moth-er IX’ convey the miasmal deleteriousness of colonialism. I look from amongst this haze, however, and as I transport and transpose natural and noxious items from waterway to artwork, I also become a caretaker of place as ecological toxins are removed.

- Siri Hayes

Hayes was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize for a work similar in composition and technique as Moth-er IX. Hayes is also represented within MAPh's collection.

Anna Higgins’ expanded image-based practice incorporates found archival and contemporary material, as well as her own images and film, which are abstracted and re-contextualized through collage, painting, drawing, and film photography to form new perceptions and poetic interpretations. Working experimentally at large scale on paper, recent interests have been an inquiry into atmospheric light, colour and visual music, aiming to evoke the experiential and immaterial elements of depicting the natural landscape.

Anna Higgins (b.1991 Melbourne) completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts (2013) and graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London post-graduate program (2023). Recent exhibitions include: Afterimage, The Artist Room, London (2024) Love Theme, Negative Press, Melbourne (2024), The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, Peles, Berlin (2024), Photography: Real and Imagined, National Gallery of Victoria (2024), Viewfinding, Sapling, London (2023) Immaterialism, Mackintosh Lane, London (2023), New Paintings, Sonya Gallery, New York (2023) Stargazing, Museum of Australian Photography (2023), The Amber Room, Matt’s Gallery, London (2023), Every Atom is a Mirror, Royal Academy Schools, London (2023), A Place Beyond Heaven, ReadingRoom, Melbourne (2022).

Anna was the 2021 artist in residence at the Australian Archaeological Institute in Athens, and is co-director of Mackintosh Lane, London. Anna lives and works in London, UK.

Artist statement: My expanded image-based practice incorporates found archival and contemporary material, as well as my own images and film, which are abstracted and re-contextualised through collage, painting, drawing, and film photography to form new perceptions and poetic interpretations.

‘Vision’ takes the form of a photographic diptych printed on heavy drawing paper, comprising two separate frames of a 16mm film, that are dyed a golden hue and enlarged to show the moment the sun bursts through the leaves of a Eucalyptus tree. Appearing to be drawn with light, intuitive mark-making has then been applied and the image rephotographed on colour reversal film to create movement and a metaphysical link between each panel.

- Anna Higgins

Higgins is a MAPh collection and exhibiting artist, with two works held within the collection that were exhibited in MAPh's exhibition Stargazing in 2024. The work being offered at auction was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize.

Born in Italy in 1993 and based in Naarm/Melbourne, Rudi Williams is an artist and teacher. Her practice is centred around employing historic and contemporary image-making processes to create works from her archive of still and moving, analogue and digital images that she has been making since 2008.

Her exhibitions often pair and contrast images taken at different times, in disparate places, with varying photographic forms to contemplate her own history and heritage in relation to concepts of memory, place, the passing of time and the archive.

Her work is elliptical and layered, often depicting reflections, visual anomalies, distorted architectural details and residue of human presence on surfaces. These individual works are woven together to construct site specific installations; constellations that dissect the mechanisms of imagemaking as sculptural forms to reference the history and legacy of representation and the context images are read in.

Artist statement: Considering surface, duration and the documentation of interior atmospheres, the series Mirror mirror is a long-term study of artist Rosslynd Piggott’s pivotal diptych ‘Mirror, mirror III’ (2008–09). Comprising a slumped, mirrored glass panel and a textured, palladium-gilt canvas, this archival work encapsulates Piggott’s enduring fascination with unclear mirrors.

My photographs depict the contorted reflections cast in ‘Mirror, mirror III’ (2008–09) within Piggott’s interior spaces and installations. Captured between 2013–24, the photographs function as both documents of Piggott’s interiors and as abstracted distillations of the liquified space reflected in the slumped and mirrored glass. My series distils a tension between the fixed and the ephemeral, the abstract and figurative, further contemplating duration and context as well as the aura and myth that surrounds art objects, interiors, and the artist.

- Rudi Williams

Williams has been a shortlisted artist twice in the Bowness Photography Prize (2015, 2024), including in 2024 for this work.

Jo Duck is a fine art and advertising photographer.

Inspired by all things camp, joyful, and absurd, Duck’s work radiates an optimism that contributes to a distinctive style. One that is simultaneously strange and heartwarming.

Duck has been a finalist for the Bowness Photography prize (2024, 2021, 2019), the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award (2022) and The National Portrait Prize (2023, 2024). Duck has exhibited work at CCP (Melbourne), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Photo 2024 (Melbourne).

Artist statement: ‘The pillow’ is an image of a woman trying, with limited success, to evade facial recognition technology. People born in the internet age have likely been tracked since birth. Everywhere we go we’re recorded without consent. Governments use facial recognition drones to track criminals, leading to wrongful arrests and a myriad of ethical concerns. ‘The pillow’ is part of a series titled Razzle dazzle, exploring a future where ridiculous disguise may be our only way to maintain anonymity, avoid mass surveillance and at least avoid horrid, targeted advertising.

‘The pillow’ is a staged portrait of a woman well acquainted with the chairs in her doctor’s waiting room. She anticipated the brown palette and dressed accordingly, bringing her own pillow to blend in and become the chair. Her alarmed expression is due to the furniture being rearranged since her last visit, putting her in clear view of the closed-circuit television camera.

- Jo Duck

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize, and comes from a series that was exhibited as part of PHOTO 2024.

Yasmin Idriss is an emerging artist and photographer based in Canberra, Australia who graduated with first class honours, having completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Photomedia) (Honours) at the Australian National University (ANU). 

Idriss's practice focusses on portraiture, documentary and floral/botanical photography, with a sustained interest in printmaking, painting and creating sculptures from steel or found objects. Idriss's focus on documentary photography projects often involve the community where they draw out people’s life stories, the important relationships in their lives and the values they hold most dear. Central to their practice is working with the subjects and involving them in the process of shaping their individual stories, both through words and images.

As they say, 'After all, life is not just a series of happy snaps in a family album, there is also hardship, grief and sadness. It is the essence of the person that I search for.' (Idriss, 2024)

Artist statement: ‘Traces of Bluetts Block at dusk’ explores the psyche of a cherished natural haven on Canberra's western edge. Created from ten layered photographic images taken on a serene winter’s evening, the artwork captures the interplay between areas and moments in Bluetts Block. With its rugged terrain and diverse flora and fauna, the block is a tranquil sanctuary amid urban sprawl.

As Canberra expands, the area faces the threat of losing its unique identity and ecological significance. Each layer in this work weaves together moments, memories and emotions, reflecting the land's complex narrative. The work symbolises the tensions between progress and preservation, echoing the land's silent witnessing of encroaching concrete and steel.

- Yasmin Idriss

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize.

Will (Aus/UK) and Garrett Huxley (Aus/Gumbaynggirr/Yorta Yorta) are Melbourne-based collaborative performance and visual artists.

The Huxleys are a dynamic duo of cataclysmic proportions who present queer spectacle and disco enthused wizardry across the visual art, performance and fashion worlds. Their photography and performance art traverses the classifications of costume, film and recording. A visual assault of sparkle, surrealism and the absurd, The Huxleys saturate their practice and projects with a glamorous, androgynous freedom which sets out to bring some escapism and magic to everyday life.

Since 2014 The Huxleys have performed, exhibited and participated in numerous exhibitions, projects and events in Australia, and internationally in London, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Hong Kong. Solo presentations, performances and commissions include the Melbourne International Arts Festival; Melbourne Fashion Week; Sydney Contemporary; Hong Kong Design Week; Heide Museum of Modern Art; Art Bank, Melbourne; NGV; AGNSW; QAGOMA; AGSA; AGWA; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Sydney Festival; Carriageworks, Sydney; Fusebox Festival, Austin Contemporary, Texas; Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle, Perth; Sydney World Pride; PHOTO 22, Melbourne and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; The Huxleys first came to prominence during the early years of MONA FOMA and Dark Mofo in Tasmania.

The Huxleys' photographs are included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; HOTA, Gold Coast; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Curtin University Gallery, Perth, The Huxleys have been finalists in the National Portrait Prize in both 2022 and 2023 and finalists in Bowness Prize 2022. They were awarded the Wai Tang Commissioning Award at MAPh in 2023 and have recently received the Highly Commended Award at the Melbourne Premier's Design Award in 2024.

'The Sunbathers' (2024) is a a key work within MAPh's solo exhibition as part of the Wai Tang Commissioning Award in 2024 The Huxleys | Bad sports which reflects upon the ostracisation you can feel when growing up in a country that values sporting achievement above all else. It can be a real struggle especially for a creative, shy queer kid searching for kindred spirits. A love of music, art, fashion and the dark underworld is perceived to offer eventual artistic salvation.

Bad sports seeks to capture the alienation, humour and abstraction that the Huxleys experienced growing up in this sunburnt country, from the larrikins looking for a fair go, a guernsey and a winning streak. For the uncoordinated and uncooperative queer prisoner, the struggle is real.

Thrust into the ferocious floodlights of the playing field, Bad sports becomes a performative way for queer people at odds with sports to feel like they can ‘play’ figuratively, creatively and physically. To allow the ridiculous feats of fashions on the field to harmonise with The Huxleys' gloriously ‘bent’ vision of the world. The Dadaist notion in full athletic prowess; a giant sequinned ball lunges for the ball in play. Art imitating sport: finally at peace with one another.

The Huxleys have also been Bowness Photography Prize shortlisted artists previously, and their work is included within MAPh's collection.

Alex Walker is a trained darkroom photographer based in Naarm/Melbourne interested in expanded photographic theory, analogue processes and spatial perception. Expanding on the literal meaning of photography as ‘drawing with light’, Walker explores the moment of image capture and extends photography to its limits by reducing it to its core elements: light, space and perception. As well as traditional photographic methods, Walker employs projection and installation to expand the photograph beyond its two-dimensional form into a physical and phenomenological, bodily encounter.

Walker has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts. Walker will present two solo exhibitions this year at PhotoAccess (Canberra) in April and Void_Melbourne in July. Selected exhibitions include: Denouement, Void_Melbourne; The light draws along..., Incinerator Gallery, 2024; Anti-lens (with Daniel O'Toole), Blindside; Denying Eye, MARS Gallery’s Art at the Bank, 2023; a-field, Heide MoMA, The Image Unfolds Again, Collingwood Yards, The Image Unfolds, Seventh Gallery, 2021.

Walker was recently featured in the 2025 Art Collector magazine issue Things Collectors Need To Know, and was a finalist in the National Photography Prize 2024, Bowness Photography Prize 2024, Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize 2023 and Exposure Photography Prize 2017. Alex has completed residencies at Lake Macquarie Arts, Quality, Studio 26, Testing Grounds and Centre for Projection Art.

Artist statement: 'Untitled (Purple & Orange)' is a unique handmade colour darkroom print made during my studies at the Victorian College of the Arts. This work represents an early exploration of abstraction, form, and composition; drawing inspiration from the Color Field paintings of Mark Rothko, reinterpreted through a contemporary photographic lens. 'Untitled (Purple & Orange)' serves as a precursor to my ongoing investigations into expanded photographic practice, visual representations of time, space, and liminal states.

Rooted in an analogue darkroom practice, my work examines the interplay between light, perception, and color, inviting my audience into embodied and perceptual encounters with photographic objects. By integrating phenomenology, spatial practice, and contemporary photographic theory, I aim to reimagine photography as an active, participatory experience, situating the viewer as an integral element in the artwork’s unfolding.

- Alex Walker

Walker was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize for a work that continues the artists exploration of conceptual investigations into the process of making a photograph and the mirror’s role within it.

Talia Smith is an artist and curator from Aotearoa New Zealand now based in Sydney, Australia. Her photographic and moving image practice explores notions of time, memory, familial histories and the way in which we connect with culture when removed from ancestral homelands.

She has exhibited at various galleries in Aotearoa, Australia, Germany and the US and in 2022 had her first institutional show at Murray Art Museum Albury. She recently completed her Masters of Fine Arts (research) from UNSW in 2020.

Artist statement: ‘Salt/wound’ is an ongoing work that explores the fraught tensions between physical and emotional distance to ancestral homelands, stolen lands we were born on and the stolen lands we now reside upon.

This image is taken in the Cook Islands – one of my ancestral homelands. The photograph was soaked for weeks in cold salt water. While soaking, colours began to bleed and turn pink and salt crusted on the physical image, eating away at the printer inks. The resulting saltwater-soaked image is a nostalgic visualisation of the tensions above: an ache.

- Talia Smith

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize and her work was exhibited at MAPh as a large scale installation in Built Photography and featured in the accompanying publication.

Justine Varga (1984-) is an Australian artist widely recognised for her deliberative engagement with the practice of photography. Varga has exhibited her work in numerous public institutions nationally and internationally, most recently at the Princeton University Art Museum in the United States and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

She is the recipient of five national juried awards, including the Josephine Ulrick and Win Shubert Photography Award in 2013 and 2016; the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture in 2017; and the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2019. In addition, her work has been included in several published histories of photography.

Varga is currently reading for a DPhil in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. Varga’s photographs are included in many important public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of South Australia; the National Gallery of Australia; and the Museum of Australian Photography, among others.

Artist statement: My photography attempts to interrogate its own form and function. This interrogation takes place within the various architectures of photography, but also in response to the medium’s particular social and political economies. Photography is, after all, an embodiment of modernity. To contest or disrupt photography’s representational conventions is therefore to contest and disrupt modernity itself.

My creative work encompasses the entire photographic object, from the inscription of a negative to its colour print, and all the various operations and performances required to generate one from the other. When an audience stands in front of ‘Diffusion (115Y30M40C)’ they therefore have an encounter with photography in this widest sense; they bear witness to the medium’s own processes of becoming.

- Justine Varga

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize. Her work has been shortlisted 5 times in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024, 2023, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014) and her work is represented within MAPh's collection artist as well as being featured in MAPh exhibitions including Antipodean emanations: cameraless photographs from Australia and New Zealand (10 March – 27 May 2018).

A Barkindji man living on Yalukit Willam Country in Melbourne, Kent Morris graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts and is an alumnus of the National Gallery of Australia’s Wesfarmers Indigenous Leadership Program. Central themes in his art practice are the connections between contemporary Indigenous experience and contemporary cultural practices and their continuation and evolution.

By reconstructing the environment through a First Nations lens, Morris reveals the continuing presence and patterns of First Nations history, culture and knowledge in the contemporary Australian landscape, despite ongoing colonial interventions in the physical and political environments.

Through a variety of sculptural and digital processes, Morris engages audiences by manipulating technology and nature into new forms that reflect First Peoples’ knowledge systems reshaping western frameworks to explore complex histories and First Peoples’ cultural continuity since time immemorial.

The interaction of native birds with the environment reflects resilience, adaption, continuity and change to ecological systems reflecting on the ways in which Indigenous cultures survive and adapt.

All Morris’ artworks are constructed from a single photograph taken while walking on Country. Apart from basic editing, digital information has not been added or subtracted from the original photograph.

Artist statement: The series contains works constructed from a photographic image that has been transformed from the single-point perspective of the camera’s eye to an immersive, kaleidoscopic network of patterns inspired by First Nations cultural knowledge systems. The repeating patterns speak of infinity through a First Nations’ lens. If this lens was utilised and incorporated, we would all understand plants, humans, animals, land, sea and sky as interconnected and interdependent.

This integrated worldview evokes a journey towards the incorporation of Indigenous knowledges and philosophies in ecosystem management in Australia. To rethink and reshape the tenets of existence and see Country not only as a resource, we need a more balanced and culturally informed system in place to provide the possibility of a sustainable future.

- Kent Morris

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize. Morris has been shortlisted previously in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024, 2023, 2017).

Amanda Williams is a visual artist living and working on Gadigal Country, Sydney, who works with the medium of photography to examine its historical legacy, material underpinnings and contemporary significance.

Williams’ work is held in several national collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and the Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and the UK, including in: The National 4, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2023); Return to nature, Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne (2022); The Truth, PHOTO 2021 International Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2021); Whose Land Is It?, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2021); and Archie Plus, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney (2020). In 2018, Williams was awarded the National Photography Prize, Murray Art Museum Albury.

Artist statement: My interest in the mountain peaks and high plains of Australia is scientific and symbolic. For several years, I have engaged in photographic research documenting the endangered ecological communities found across the Kosciuszko and Alpine National Parks. This work is part of a botanical series created en plein air – outside the confines of a darkroom and without the use of a camera – by bringing a sheet of black and white film into direct contact with the plant. This elemental process produces a photogram, one of the earliest photographic forms to emerge from experimentation with light, chemistry and substrates. The photogram negative is then printed by hand in a colour darkroom, reanimating the plant in monochromatic colour.

The plant pictured here is Xerochrysum subundulatum, known as the Alpine everlasting daisy. It is a member of the powerful Asteraceae family, the most populous flowering plant to be found on every continent apart from Antarctica. Across the alpine and sub-alpine regions it grows in abundance; defiant and resourceful in the face of climate change.

- Amanda Williams

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize. Williams has been shortlisted previously in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2015) and her work was exhibited at MAPh in Return to nature (8 July – 18 September 2022).

Dr. Kirsten Garner Lyttle (Māori-Australian, Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Tahinga) is an academic and artist serving as the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University's Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab. Her practice-led research methodology, named "whakaahua" (to transform), employs photography as a site for making Māori customary art. Kirsten’s work critiques the colonial legacy of ethnographic collections that have often regarded ancestral cultural belongings as mere “objects” rather than as living entities with their own mauri (life force) and whakapapa (genealogy).

Recent major projects include Melbourne Now 2023 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and the 9th TarraWarra Biennial. She received an honourable mention in the 2024 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize and was a finalist in the National Works on Paper 2024 at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery and the Banyule Award for Works on Paper 2023. Her art is held in prominent Australian collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria.

Artist statement: Te raranga i te awa/weaving the river continues the work of my practice-led PhD.

During my Fine Art studies, I grappled with the inherent tensions of being both Indigenous and a woman using a camera, a European tool historically wielded as a tool of colonisation. I consequently developed a strategy for working called ‘whakaahua’, meaning the action of acquiring form and transforming photographs into Indigenous subjects.

This handwoven kete (carrying basket), made from a photograph I took of a river, exemplifies this methodology by turning the photographic surface into a site for creating Māori customary art. This work offers a non-extractive approach to photography, honoring it as a taonga (treasured cultural belonging) for Māori, and celebrates cultural resilience and identity.

- Dr. Kirsten Garner Lyttle

This work was shortlisted in the 2024 Bowness Photography Prize and received an honourable mention. Lyttle has been shortlisted previously in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024, 2018, 2016). This is unique work that forms a traditional handwoven kete (carrying basket) that is displayed in a purpose built acrylic box.

Danica Chappell is a visual artist, creating on the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples, in Naarm (Melbourne). Through a cameraless darkroom practice, Chappell examines the intersecting paths of abstraction and the history of photography. Distilling the malleability of a constructed photograph, Chappell orientates her works of abstraction, geometry and shadows from an expanded photogram process. Light, form, colour and a cadence of actions collide in the haptic darkroom and become fixed as concrete and abstract spatial figuration on the light sensitive substrates.

Commissioned exhibitions include, Slippery Images for Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023), Far From The Eye, Latrobe Art Institute, Bendigo in conjunction with PHOTO2021, and Thickness of Time, Heide III MoMA Project Gallery, Melbourne (2018-19). Recent group and solo exhibitions include Colour Bleeds and Light Folds, Mejia Gallery Melbourne (2023), Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington In., USA (2023), New Matter: Recent Forms of Photography, AGNSW Sydney (2016) and Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, Govett-Brewster, New Plymouth NZ (2016), Haus Werk, McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin (2019), That's Our Shadow on the Moon, CAVES ARI (2015) & Nudge Into Form, Walker Street Gallery, Dandenong. Chappell was the recipient of an Australian Council Arts Projects Grant (2017) and has been a shortlisted artist in the Bowness Photography Prize, MAPh and MAMA National Photography Prize, Albury. Chappell has undertaken residencies at Stichting BAD, (Rotterdam), Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (Edinburgh), Bauhaus University Summer School (Weimar), as well as research in the archives of the Bauhaus Archiv (Berlin), Folkswang Museum (Essen), Musée des artes et metiers & Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (Paris).

Artist statement: ‘Blue Works (modulated form) #3’, 2023 is one in a suite of four works where the play of complimentary and contrasting colour is explored through repeating forms.

Across the series yellow, pink, green and red encroach the saturated hues of blue from the peripheries. Through time and light the colour and process feels slippery like paint on a brush, where the medium and materials is intervened by the darkroom haptic in the absence of sighted making.

- Danica Chappell

Chappell has been consistently shortlisted in the Bowness Photography Prize for over a decade (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014) and her work is held within MAPh's collection as well as featuring in many exhibitions including most recently Antipodean emanations: cameraless photographs from Australia and New Zealand (10 March – 27 May 2018).

Petrina Hicks is an Australian artist based in Sydney who creates large-scale photographs that draw from mythology, fables, and historical art imagery to re-frame the contemporary female experience.

She exhibits nationally and internationally and in 2019 held a survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Bleached Gothic and in 2024 a solo exhibition at MAPh, Snakes and mirrors.

Hicks works are held in major Australian collections including; National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Australian Photography, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

In May 2024 Hicks’s work Shenae and Jade (2005) sold at auction for a record price ($68,750 AUD) through auction house Deutscher and Hackett, from a Berlin vendor’s private collection. With an edition of eight, Shenae and Jade is also held in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW.

Petrina Hicks’s large-scale photographs draw from mythology, fables and art history to re-frame the contemporary female experience.

Permeated with a sense of magical realism, animals and females often appear together to represent aspects of psyche and identity, alluding to the complexity of female identity and the sentience of animals. Central to her work are the porous boundaries between human and animal states, and the affinity of females and animals .

This work is central to the series created specifically for and exhibited within MAPh's major exhibition Snakes and mirrors (2024-2025). Within this series Hicks contemplates the self-awareness of animals, and our desire to understand the phenomenology of animal life from a human perspective. Underpinning this series is an exploration of animal consciousness and self-awareness; how do animals experience the universe?

Hicks was moved by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Eighth Duino Elegy’, which portrays the mystical relationship between humans and animals, and contemplates how humans and animals experience time and phenomena differently.

Being unaware of death the animal looks not backward to the past as man does, but forward into an undivided totality. (1)

Humans perceive time as a linear continuum: of past, present, future; however, for animals, Rilke suggests they exist in a unified, harmonious totality completely different to our world view. An animal is not conscious of the finite nature of existence, with death as the end date. The animal sees the world as a unity; the animal is part of the world, not separated from it as subject and object.

Within Snakes and mirrors Hicks challenges the traditional human-centred vision of the world to emphasise the interconnectedness of humans and animals – serpents, birds, monkeys and human bind together, blurring the boundaries between the two in intimate vignettes that propose time in stasis.

This work was exhibited at MAPh as part of the Luminary artist series for the exhibition Snakes and mirrors, and has also recently been exhibited at the Chinese Museum (Melbourne) as part of The Round Square Banquette exhibition celebrating Chinese New Year 2025.

Amos Gebhardt brings a cinematic force to large-scale moving image installations and photography, leading to intimate collaborations with performers, choreographers, and sound artists. Gebhardt’s sustained practice of visually rich work is epitomised by a courageous commitment to agitating dominant narratives around marginality, representation, queerness and more than human ecologies.

In 2022 Gebhardt was awarded the Bowness Photography Prize for ‘Wallaby’, and was a finalist in the National Photography Prize at MAMA and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award, HOTA in the same year.

In 2024 Gebhardt won the prestigious National Photographic Portrait Prize for a portrait of acclaimed Waanyi author, Alexis Wright from the series Mångata. The work was commissioned by MAPh and exhibited as part of MAPh’s Luminaries exhibition season Mångata (23 November 2024 – 16 February 2025).

‘Burning Crescent’ (2024) is a signature work from Mångata. It has a personal significance for the artist, as it depicts the moon taken on Kaurna country where they live.

Mångata is a Swedish term describing a pathway towards the horizon created by the Moon’s reflection on water — a metaphorical road into the unknown.

The enchantment of the Moon has inspired humanity’s imagination and direction through the ages. Drawing on the Moon as a symbol of illumination, Gebhardt’s Mångata weaves sound and moving image with portraits lit entirely by moonlight.

Interlinked with lunar studies, the series features visionaries in their fields who imagine liberated and collective futures in these dystopian times, and address systems of power and liberation in their life and work. These subjects are paired with the elemental power of the moon, a symbol of dreams and illumination.

Working across themes of climate justice, abolition, storytelling, anti-oppression practice, and cultural theory, participants include Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Alexis Wright, Anjali Sharma, Aseel Tayah, Debbie Kilroy, Leah Manaema Avene and Nevo Zisin.

Gebhardt experiments with the edges of analogue photography to connect celestial scales of time with liberatory figures who seek to alter the direction of human presence on our planet. The twin spheres of the moon and the human eye are linked as witness and conscience. Reflected in the participants’ eyes are tracings of the Moon itself created through subtle movement of the human body in dialogue with Earth’s rotation.

As Earth’s closest celestial companion, the Moon offers an enduring lesson in renewal through its eternal cycling, where the death of the old Moon always brings forth the birth of a new one. The moonlit figures in Mångata are harbingers of renewal, reflecting the interconnected labour of liberatory praxis that signals the undoing of the times we live in.

Brook Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, performance, museum intervention, and mixed media; he also works on curatorial projects. His work is often grounded in his perspective as an Indigenous person of the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal peoples of Australia. Recent exhibitions include Holding Ceremony (2024), Ames Yavuz at Frieze, London, Seeds and Souls (2024), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Liverpool Biennial 2023, Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023), and ngaay ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken) (2022), Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.

Brook was the artistic director of NIRIN: the 22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020; international advisor for the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022; and co-curator of YOYI Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau, 2022. Brook is Adjunct Curator ngurambang-ayinya (First Nations), Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; and Adjunct Curator at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. As Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections, University of Melbourne, Australia Brook founded BLAK C.O.R.E, a collective driven by First Nations methodologies.

Brook is represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Ames Yavuz Gallery, and Tolarno Galleries.

Artist statement: 'Systems of Substance' (2016-2017) is a series of photographic montages that combine photographic images of late nineteenth century landscapes from Tasmania and Victoria, Australia, with early ethnographic images from across the world sourced from museums such as the musée du quai Branly, Paris and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge.

Initially captured on glass slide negatives, the re-created images, remove or shift the horizon line to create a sense of disorientation. This effect references the psychological, but more so the depiction and stories of the Australian alien landscape intertwined with an international narrative of past and ongoing colonial tropes of the ‘discovered’, the ‘romanticisied’ and arguably imagined peoples and landscapes coined within an often-unrealistic colonial oppressive gaze.

In 'Systems of Substance' my intent is to illustrate ideas of possession and the forgotten power of the land – possessing the land or the land possessing us – as well as the power of the one photographed to gaze back to us today.

- Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew is one of Australia's most important artists, and his work is held within MAPh's collection as well as featuring in MAPh's exhibition program including Australian exotica (16 April – 29 May 2016) and LEGACY. Your collection. Our story. (15 June – 19 September 2018). He was the subject of the ground-breaking solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia The Right to Offend is Sacred (3 Mar 2017 – 4 Jun 2017) and he is a world renowned curator and Artistic Director and most recently was named ArtReview’s Power 100 as one of the most influential people in the contemporary artworld for the fifth time.