Women Photographers 1853-2018

Visual art exhibition review | Brian Rope

Women Photographers 1853-2018 | Various Artists

National Gallery of Australia | 11 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Women photographers 1853–2018 is presented as highlighting “the transformative impact of women artists on the history of photography.” It is another Know My Name project, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) initiative celebrating the work of all women artists to enhance understanding of their contribution to Australia’s cultural life.

I confess expecting to see many more images covering the full period from 1853 to 2018. It actually is a modest selection from the NGA photography collection which, since its inception, has reflected the vital place of women in the medium’s history. Indeed, some of its earliest acquisitions were major works by women.

Highlights from the Australian and International collections have been identified to explore ways in which women artists have used photography to relate stories about themselves and other women. Their works created new ways of seeing how women were shaped by their relationships with the world in which they lived, negotiating its challenges, celebrating its beauty or whatever.

As a result, the NGA most certainly and validly is able to state it is “uniquely placed to consider how photography has changed the worlds in which women live, and how women have changed photography.” For women artists, making photographs arguably has always been an act of resistance. Photography certainly has given women access to spaces of knowledge, artistic practices and technology from which they once were excluded.

In the 1840s, English pioneer botanist Anna Atkins advanced botanical illustration and natural history. She assisted to steward new levels of scientific accuracy with her cyanotypes of algae. Here we see an example of her work from 1853 using what is one of today’s popular mediums. 

Anna Atkins - Heraclium Lanatum, America 1853

from Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns

cyanotype, printed image 35.3 (h) x 24.8 (w) cm

sheet 47.8 (h) x 37.5 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1986

In 1874 the famous poet Alfred Tennyson asked the Indian-born British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron to make photographic illustrations for a new edition of his Idylls of the King, a recasting of the Arthurian legends. Responding that both knew that “it is immortality to me to be bound up with you,” Cameron willingly accepted the assignment.

Julia Margaret Cameron - 'Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat' 1874

albumen silver photograph, image 34.8 (h) x 28.2 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1979

During the 1920s and 1930s, entrepreneurial women ran successful photography studios that brought tremendous innovation to photography’s place in fashion and advertising.

By 1940-41, Austrian-born American photographer Lisette Model was producing very different images. She is primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography. After relocating to America to escape Hitler, she soon created two innovative series of photographs inspired by the energy of the city. In one, an ankle-high perspective and stylistic blurring powerfully reveal the hurried pace of the metropolis at rush hour. 

Lisette Model - Running legs, Fifth Avenue, New York 1940-41

gelatin silver photograph, image 49.5 (h) x 39.6 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1981

In the 1970s, women photographers influenced by feminism and environmentalism produced personal, political and communal works. In the 1980s and 1990s, various Australian First Nations artists began to reclaim the medium that had played a part in subjecting their ancestors to colonial scrutiny by white settlers. 

In 1976, Australian photographer Ponch Hawkes photographed herself and her friends with their mothers in a series Our Mums and us, revealing the rhythms and patterns of intimacy in those families. 

Ponch Hawkes - Rosa and Ruth 1976 - from Our Mums and us

gelatin silver photograph

printed image 17.7 (h) x 12.7 (w) cm, sheet 25.4 (h) x 20.2 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982

 

American photographer Cindy Sherman’s 1977 Untitled Film Stills is a suite of black-and-white images in which she posed in the guises of various generic female film characters, contributing to a needed conversation about oversimplified representations of women.

Cindy Sherman - Untitled film still # 3 1977 - from Untitled Film Stills

gelatin silver photograph

printed image 16.1 (h) x 24.0 (w) cm, sheet 30.4 (h) x 35.4 (w) cm

Frame 43.2 (h) x 58.5 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1983

Annette Messager was born into a family of atheists who took a particular pleasure in their local Catholic church. Her work draws on religious iconography, with unholy intentions. In her 1989 piece, My Vows, tiny photos of body parts are hung in a cluster. Genitals, mouths and eyes hint at eroticism rather than spirituality. 

Annette Messager - Mes voeux [My vows] 1989

gelatin silver photographs, colour pencil on paper, string

installation variable 350.0 (h) x 90.0 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1993

© Annette Messager. ADAGP/Copyright Agency

Patricia Piccinini (born in Sierra Leone) is an Australian artist who works in a variety of media. She is well-known for The Skywhale, a hot air balloon work, and also for investigating relationships between nature, science and technology. In Psychogeography 1996 she explores the genetic engineering debate. It examines reality and fantasy, by featuring Australian actress Sophie Lee cradling a LUMP™ (Lifeform with Unevolved Mutant Properties), evoking curiosity about a future with malleable human bodies.

Psychogeography 1996 - from The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP)

chromogenic photograph

printed image 120.7 (h) x 243.7 (w) cm, sheet 129.2 (h) x 271.2 (w) cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased with Funds from the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Foundation

© Patricia Piccinini

Nowadays, numerous women make artworks testing the limits of photography and its relationship to the world.

This review is also available on the author's blog.

 

Sanctuary

Exhibition Review: Photography | Brian Rope

SANCTUARY | 25 Artists

Sutton Village Gallery | 1 - 23 June 2024

The goal of this exhibition is to present a wide range of viewpoints about sanctuary. Australian and international artists honour the history of photography and the skill that goes into making images using traditional printing methods. The labour-intensive methods have produced handmade prints with rich textures and fine details that compel visitors to take their time, approach closely, and recognize the creativity and talent that went into each artwork. The visual narrative transports viewers to comforting spaces through found moments of serenity or consolation. We are encouraged to consider how we define sanctuary and how it may be apparent in our own lives.

The artworks include photopolymer photogravure with chin colle, salt prints from a wet collodion glass negative, cyanotypes and gum bichromates over cyanotype, Vandyke brown prints, albumen prints, carbon transfer prints on glass, a polaroid lifted and transferred onto watercolour paper, carbon prints from an iPhone capture, lith prints, chromogenic colour contact prints, tintype, and the Mordençage technique. No doubt, like me, most readers will not be familiar with all these processes. That is just one very good reason to visit this exhibition.

So, let me now share here just some of the pieces on show. Sydney artist Amanda Lawson has a profound love of botanical forms. She is exhibiting two delightful photogravure prints of tidal flow scenes in the Jervis Bay national parks. 

TIDAL FLOW 2024, Photopolymer photogravure with chin colle on Fabriano Ivory 220 gsm © Amanda Lawson

Danielle Edwards, from Melbourne, similarly finds sanctuary whilst walking through forests. Her infrared capture of a giant coastal redwood is simply beautiful.

THE GIANT ed. 4/15. Photographed 2018, Printed 2022 Platinum Palladium
on French Bergger 100% cotton paper - © Danielle Edwards

Local artist Chris Holly also finds sanctuary in the bush. His artworks were made on black & white film on a 1950s twin lens reflex camera. Then he used the Van Dyke brown process with a ferric ammonium citrate/silver nitrate chemistry. The emulsion was hand-painted onto Bergger 320gsm 100% cotton paper and then exposed by contact printing to ultraviolet light. He describes the resultant prints, of rocks in the Namadgi National Park which many of us would not even notice, as reverent and respectful. And, indeed, they are.

Untitled I, 2024 - Vandyke on Bergger 320gsm COT paper, Print size, 16x16cm, 41x51cm, framed © Chris Holly

Canberra artist (and busy commercial photographer) Hilary Wardhaugh is now an empty nester. She has moved to a home where the garden provides her with inspiration as well as sanctuary. Using Polaroid film that expired 20 years ago when her son was born, she has created a Polaroid lift of her favourite chair in the garden. It is an excellent example of how a good image can be made using a simple subject.

EMPTY-NESTER GARDEN U/S Polaroid lift and transfer onto watercolour paper © Hilary Wardhaugh

Another Canberran, Ossian Desmond-Jones is showing cyanotypes. One is of a nautilus shell which “forms a perfect protective sanctuary for the creature that inhabits it, and functions as an object of beauty on its own.” The technique used has created most interesting colours. 

NAUTILUS II U/S 2024 - (Cyanotype with copper instead of iron) on A3 Fabriano watercolour paper
© OSSIAN DESMOND- JONES

One international guest artist is Diana H. Bloomfield of North Carolina, USA. Her gum bichromate piece most successfully demonstrates that this process can resolve fine details in numerous colours.

SUNFLOWERS U/S 2018, Gum bichromate on 100% archival cotton rag. Print size 32x41cm,

frame size 48x39cm © Diana H Bloomfield.

Gallery operator Kim Sinclair has assembled a fine body of handmade prints, including one of her own delightful artworks. Every piece is of high quality and worthy of close inspection.

This review is also available on the author's blog here. And it has also been published in the June issue of The Printer at pages 18-21: here.

All my memories are mistranslations

Exhibition Review: Mixed Media | Brian Rope

All my memories are mistranslations | Omar Musa

Humble House Gallery, Canberra | 4 May – 2 June 2024

Does this artist need introduction? He is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist, poet and woodcutter from Queanbeyan, Australia - well-known to many as a rapper. In recent times he has been creating music and visual art in the two very different places he lives between - Malaysian Borneo and Brooklyn, New York City.

Omar Musa has recently been in Australia talking about his latest album which touches on environment, culture, religious identity, and mortality. And to bring us this solo exhibition All my memories are mistranslations - comprising Cyanotypes, Linocuts and Woodcuts on a variety of materials, plus a Cast Glass sculpture. The largest cyanotypes are 70cm x 95cm.

The diverse works tell us much provided we explore them closely and think about the messages Musa is seeking to share. As with the album mentioned above, the artworks look at cultural and environmental matters. And much more. The show’s title reveals a starting point for our explorations – it’s about the artist’s misinterpreted memories. His artist statement says he has found out, years later, that he misheard stories his grandparents told him, that “crucial things were lost in translation.”

The artist goes on to tell us that in this exhibition he wanted “to lean into dissonance, these spaces lacking coherence; find comfort in contradiction.” So, he sought to make a playful, unsettling world inhabited by ghosts.

Musa’s poetry piece with the same title as this show makes other references to ghosts, including one posing the question Am I so different from a hoax ghost photographer of a past age? One artwork, titled Tumbled Dry Brooklyn Ghost Boy, includes Bornean boys sailing across a coin-operated washing machine in Brooklyn.

Tumbled Dry Brooklyn Ghost Boy – Cyanotype, 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa

A huge Woodcut has an equally huge title – The river is a keris / a sacred dagger / cast from meteoric iron & scrapyard bike frame nickel / patterned skin a trillion times folded with rain & song / whetted on white hot sun. Additional words on the artwork read Battle Cry or Requiem? We Buried Our Eyes In a Storm. So much to see, to read, to consider.

The river is a keris / a sacred dagger / cast from meteoric iron & scrapyard bike frame nickel / patterned skin a trillion times folded with rain & song / whetted on white hot sun - Woodcut, ink on blackout cloth, 148.59cm H x 396cm W © Omar Musa

Another smaller Woodcut has a very simple title but again has much to examine, clearly telling us that our memories are not always correct; indeed far more likely to distort over time. Perhaps, like eels, our memories can swim backwards by reversing the direction of the wave?

Bubu – Woodcut, ink on paper, 61cm H x 122cm, 2022 (reprint) © Omar Musa

A simple drawing conveys a familiar message about the way some folk converse with friends in their dreams. The resultant Linocut’s title adds further information.

He Said, “You Need to Relax, Bro” – Linocut, ink on paper 36.5cm H x 34.5cm W © Omar Musa

It is unsurprising that in many artworks, this poet/rapper again uses words. In his Smoke Over Sulu cyanotype there are words which, I believe, relate to Islamic prayer, a Malayic oral poetry form and how speakers of different native languages use a common language to converse. The background scene shows smoke rising. Is it environmental smoke? Was it caused by a terrorist attack? Something else?

Smoke Over Sulu 2 – Cyanotype 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa

Another Cyanotype, Too Hard to Say, has no words on it but, nevertheless, speaks most eloquently.

Too Hard To Say – Cyanotype, 58cm H x 46cm W © Omar Musa

In an introductory statement about the exhibition, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah says “Omar is a cipher. Everything is a signpost for something more, different eyes find different truths.” If you visit this exhibition, your eyes - and your minds I expect - will very likely find different truths to me and to others who have explored it.

This review is also available on the author's blog here. And a shorter version is on the Canberra City News website here.

 

Under the Sun & Cyscapes

Photography | Brian Rope

Under the Sun & Cyscapes | Jane Duong

Reading Room Gallery, Rusten House Art Centre | 4 February – 25 March 2023

Jane Duong is a Canberra-based photographer. She majored in photomedia at Edith Cowan University in 2003 for a Bachelor of Communications. Then, in 2007, graduated with a Diploma in Museums and Collections from the ANU.

As with her Sunkissed exhibition in 2022, Duong has used the cyanotype technique for this show. Under the Sun is more substantial - both in terms of the number of works and their content. Once again, the works do not shout seeking attention, but quietly encourage visitors in for a closer investigation. The cyanotype process dates back to the dawn of photography and was invented by astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842. Prints are created with the use of a light-sensitive chemical mixture coated on paper, ultraviolet (or sun) light to expose, and water to wash before drying.

So, what are we looking at here? The artworks result from an exploration and celebration of public spaces and historical places in Queanbeyan - through the magic and coincidence that comes with the cyanotype process. Her subjects include The Dog & Stile Inn, the Queanbeyan River, Rusten and Benedict Houses, and the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Each exhibited print is a one-off, handmade on cotton paper. Some have unique borders. Some have been created with negative contact sheets. And some exposed artworks were washed by dipping them directly into the Queanbeyan River.

Cross to bear - Jane Duong

Rusten House I - Jane Duong

When I learned to make prints from negatives in a darkroom years ago, it was drummed into me to use clean water for the processes. Nowadays, a growing number of artists seem to be using “unclean” water. Some collect water from creeks, dams, oceans or wherever to use. Others immerse the paper or other material on which they are printing directly into a water source, as Duong has done here for some works. In the last couple of days I have seen this approach questioned on social media, with someone wondering aloud whether it was appropriate to “contaminate” the ocean with cyanotype chemicals. Responses have been varied. 

Dip your toe in the water - Jane Duong

Cyscapes is a video work previously shown at a 2022 Contour 556 event, the Forest Bathing Night Walk, put on by Localjinni Shinrin-Yoku in the Cork Forest at the National Arboretum. Localjinni refers to itself as an eco-feminist art collective which, traveling in collective safety at night, transforms spaces into places using visual art, poetry, music, film, oral history, and digital stories.

The collective states that it ‘strides’ to bring local culture and active travel together, to reclaim community ownership of the street and public spaces. It asks that we think of the collective’s members as art street vendors. They screen virtual exhibitions, lighting up parks, paths, and plazas on night walks and scooter rides.

Their focus on place recognises the importance of local production and local knowledge. As a Virtual Artist Run Initiative (VARI), including more than fifty contributing artists and artworkers, they bring research and teamwork together to develop and refine new ways of connecting people to place. Checkout their website for more details: localjinni.com.au.

If, like me, you missed the Night Walk, you can view an interesting 2-minute showreel of it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTiKKhoH2J4. 

The video on display in this gallery exhibition is described by the artist as “moving image, colour, sound, 2 minutes 46 seconds”. On a loop, viewers are able to watch the full video of moving images as many times as they wish. I watched them, mesmerised and enjoying windmills and foliage appearing on a tree.

Cyscapes-3 - Jane Duong (Still from video)

Cyscapes-2 - Jane Duong (Still from video)

Cyanotype images cleverly layered and manipulated with Duong’s choice of today’s software (which utilises Artificial Intelligence) created this most worthwhile video exhibit.

This review was first published in The Canberra Times on page 10 of Panorama and online here. It is also available on the author's blog here.

Into the Blue II

Photography | Brian Rope

Into the Blue II | Andrea Bryant, Kim Sinclair, Carolyn Pettigrew, Kiera Hudson, Carolyn Young, Linda Sukamta, Chris Byrnes, Mat Hughes, Ellie Young, Peter McDonald, Hilary Warren, Rebecca Murray, Jean Burke, Susan Baran, Jenny Dettrick, Virginia Walsh, Kaye Dixon & Wendy Currie

Sutton Village Gallery | 8 September - 9 October

Into the Blue II is the second annual group exhibition at Sutton Village Gallery showcasing the historic Cyanotype print and its application in contemporary art. 

Eighteen artists showcase a variety of cyanotype print methods using both original and ‘new’ cyanotype formulae, including prints on fabric, wet cyanotypes, photograms, contact prints from both large format film negatives and digital negatives, toned prints, and incorporated in multi-media applications.

Cyanotypes are one of the oldest photographic printing processes in the history of photography. The distinctive original feature of the prints is their cyan blue colour, resulting from exposure to ultraviolet light. But if you go to this exhibition expecting all the prints to be purely that colour, then you are in for a surprise. P McDonald’s Rocks Mornington Peninsula is a classic example. It is not cyan blue; it is a sepia colour.

Rocks Mornington Peninsula © P McDonald

If you expect all the works to have uneven edges revealing where the chemical solution was applied, again you will be surprised. So too if you expect all the works to be on fabrics or watercolour papers and not framed.

Melbourne-based photographer Mat Hughes works primarily with large format view cameras. Wet scans from selected negatives are meticulously made to create quality digital negatives from which to contact print. He finds light in dark shadows and turns the normal into sublime in his unique, beautiful and delicate printed cyanotypes. His Woodys Lake is a glorious example, although again not cyan blue.

Woodys Lake © Mat Hughes

Another Melbourne-based artist, Keira Hudson, specialises in different photographic processes, often interweaving different mediums together. During 2022, working with an artificial intelligence (AI) program, Hudson input different text prompts then altered the resulting images physically and digitally to create her cyanotypes on fabric.

Hudson’s use of AI raises interesting questions – many photographers currently are debating whether doing so means the outcome is no longer photography. More importantly, Getty Images is now refusing to accept submissions created using AI generative models because of concerns regarding copyright and plagiarism. Of Hudson’s artworks here, I most enjoyed Chalkboard. I have no idea how it was created, but it certainly says cyanotype to me, and I like it.

Chalkboard, 2022 © Keira Hudson

In Linda Sukamta’s cyanotype prints, the use of various artistic or communicative media, design and image layering applications are less habitually used techniques characteristic of her practice. Right Where I Belong is a fine example. Primarily in the traditional cyan blue, but also including a nearly opposite orange-red colour, it features botany.

Right Where I Belong © Linda Sukamta

Carolyn Young is a visual artist based in the Canberra region. Her artworks engage in ideas around land care, relationship to place, and between culture and nature. The excellent piece included here is a portrait of Harriet Scott (a naturalist in the mid-late 1880s) and chenuala heliaspis (a type of local moth thought to feed on wattle, eucalypts & pine).

Harriet Scott and Chenuala Heliaspis © Carolyn Young

Kaye Dixon is displaying some wonderfully imaginative works, reminiscent of illustrations in children’s or fantasy books. Of them, Draco the Dragon is the standout for me.

Draco the Dragon (from the bone woman series) © Kaye Dixon

Rebecca Murray is a Victoria-based artist engaging in contemporary and historical photographic processes. Works which explore time, place, belonging and un-belonging feature in this exhibition.

I did find myself wondering about the use of matting and frames resulting in the covering up of the traditional “messy” edges which have always been part of cyanotypes. Perhaps the artists primarily do so in order to create attractive pieces for potential purchasers to display on their home walls?

Each artist in the exhibition has contributed works well worth viewing – and a drive to Sutton Village to visit this gallery (and the nearby bakery) is a pleasing outing at any time.

This review was first published by The Canberra Times online here and at page 43 of their print version of 3/10/22. It is also available on the author's blog here.

Sky Eternal by Cat Wilson, Up in the Air by Claire Grant, Wild Blue Yonder by Photo Access members

Photography | Brian Rope

Sky Eternal | Cat Wilson

Up in the Air | Claire Grant

Photo Access | 30 June – 30 July

The artists in these two exhibitions have used sky space to explore our human condition. They invite us to reflect on the importance of the surface of our planet and the sky space above - and the care needed to keep everything in good condition.

Blue moon. Blue Monday. Blue blood. Is blue hardwired into our psyche? Did it contribute to our evolutionary development - as hunter-gatherers who learnt to survive among blue skies and oceans? It is the major colour of the works in these shows. Most appropriately, an accompanying Photo Access members’ exhibition has the theme “Wild Blue Yonder.”

 

Trevor Lund, Exploring Scoresby Sound, 2022

From the “Wild Blue Yonder” members’ exhibition

Across the ages, blue has been used when visualising something from our imagination, out of reach or the divine. As a pigment, blue is extremely rare in nature, despite being found in the environment around us – from the tranquil light blue of a sky to the melancholy deep blue of an ocean. Unlike particular reds, browns and yellows, blue pigment cannot be created from materials within our easy grasp. Arguably, blue represents an entirely new world beyond our own.

Sky Eternal by Cat Wilson is an immersive video installation, which mirrors moving cloudscapes. The immediate reaction on entering the room regardless of the point the video has reached is that one is looking at a Rorschach inkblot. I wonder what Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli would make of this slowly changing inkblot. Accompanied by an ambient soundscape, composed by Jamie Saxe, this is a captivating work. The catalogue suggests it “mediates on the ways in which the universal and timeless sky unites us all, a metaphor for innovation, positivity, hope and heaven.” When I joined them, I wanted to ask others viewing it what they saw in the inkblot. As they were transfixed, I couldn’t interrupt.

Cat Wilson - Eternal Sky, 2021 - video still

Up in the Air by Claire Grant includes three things. Firstly, there is a 90 x 400 cm composite of 57 A4-sized cyanotypes each printed on fragile paper ephemera that the artist collected during employment as a flight attendant. The papers originally were crew briefings providing details of routes she would be flying, so amongst the imagery she has created there is text and lines and also creases and marks - as she folded the paper to fit in her pocket during each trip.

The images are aerial vignettes framed by Grant’s 'office' windows, the plane's portholes. They are, truly, landscapes. As the aircraft flew over an outback mine, we can see that open cut mine’s landscape in regional Queensland laid out below us. Some of the cyanotypes are essentially white images of the clouds below the plane. Others reveal different aspects of the atmosphere. We are looking at skies filled with navigational charts to and from different destinations around Australia.

It is also worth noting that the artist captured the initial works with a phone camera, making use of its technical limitations to obtain the pixelated and repetitive images that she wanted for her pe-visualised end product. It is quite wonderful.

Claire Grant - Nothing's as precious as a hole in the Ground, 2021-22 (Detail)

Claire Grant - Nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground, 2021-22

On the opposite wall of the gallery is a series of individual artworks, each being cyanotypes and encaustic on washi paper - renowned for strength not fragility. Each image is framed by a porthole. Reflecting the recent period of air travel disruptions, many show terminal boards indicating numerous cancelled flights.

Claire Grant - CANCELLED(CBROvernight), 2022

Claire Grant - Up In The Air (Installation Photo 9)

On the end wall of the “aircraft’s corridor” is one further work - a large cyanotype portrayal of Employee 152578’s pre-employment dental record adding a final piece to this clever interpretation of Grant’s previous career. The whole exhibition opens up a shutdown world.

Claire Grant, Dental Record (Employee 152578), 2022 (Installation Photo)

This review was first published on page 10 of the Panorama supplement in The Canberra Times of 9 July 2022 and online here. It is also available on the author's blog here.

Sunkissed

 Photography Exhibition Review | Brian Rope

SUNKISSED | JANE DUONG

ACT Hub, 14 Spinifex Street, Kingston | Until 25 June 2022

(By appointment or during theatre performances)

The Causeway Hall in Kingston is the oldest hall in Canberra and a listed item on the ACT Heritage Register. It was completed in 1926 with voluntary labour using materials provided by the Federal Capital Commission. The Causeway remains a distinct district within the suburb of Kingston, although now abutted by the foreshore development.

For some time, the Hall served as Canberra's principal place of entertainment. It was, variously, a picture theatre, a dance hall, a concert venue and a place where boxing matches were held.

This year has seen the building transformed and, as ACT HUB, become a venue for independent theatre productions, such as Free Rain’s production of David Williamson’s Emerald City (8 – 25 June). It is also now presenting exhibitions of artworks, with this show by Jane Duong being the first.

Sunkissed is a modest exhibition. Modest in terms of artwork numbers and sizes. Modest in terms of the works being gentle, almost describable as quiet. They do not shout out for attention, but nevertheless encourage visitors in for a closer investigation of their contents. The venue itself is also modest – in terms of capacity and its somewhat understated décor in the particular area where the artworks hang.

Duong is a Canberra-based photographer with a Bachelor of Communications, majoring in photomedia, and a Diploma in Museums and Collections. Her previous photographic projects include Red Brick Road images from another important part of Canberra’s heritage - the Yarralumla Brickworks.

Red Brick Road was an exploration of the Brickworks architecture, landscape and objects and the use of photography to trigger, layer and construct memory. Duong’s works for that show combined film photography with Van Dyke Brown printing, allowing for the study and representation of time and the ephemeral nature of memory.

The heritage listing of the Causeway Hall makes it most appropriate that Duong has again used an old technique to explore and celebrate it and the nearby Jerrabomberra Wetlands. This time, however, the process is Cyanotype which dates back to the dawn of photography and was invented by astronomer Sir John Herschel in 1842. Cyanotype prints are created with the use of a light-sensitive chemical mixture coated on paper, UV (or sun) light and water to develop and fix.

For heritage reasons, it is not possible to attach works directly to the walls as is a common practice today in many galleries. So all the works are framed. They look great hanging - from a “picture rail” - against a wall, the colour of which blends nicely with the frames and shows off the classic blue tones of cyanotypes.

Each one-off print in this exhibition has been handmade by Duong. Some have unique borders, some have been created with a negative contact sheet, while others have been dipped directly into Wetland waterways.

Several of the works show the Hall itself. Duong has created panoramas using her phone, distorting the building a little, and used software to make some adjustments. Then she has used an inkjet printer to create negatives of each finished image on A4-sized film and used those negatives to create her exhibited prints on cotton paper using the Cyanotype process.

Old Causeway Hall II_Jane Duong_2022

Other works show a nearby entrance to, and parts of, the Jerrabomberra Wetlands – which themselves include some important historic relics of early Canberra.

 

Jerra Wetlands_Jane Duong_2022

Biyaligee Boardwalk_Jane Duong_2022

Waterways_Jane Duong_2022

And then there are two very different works. These were made by placing the paper directly into Wetlands waterways. They are dark and moody images, which seem quite an appropriate way to show an underwater area. The resultant works allow viewers to consider for themselves just what they are seeing.

This review was published in The Canberra Times of 5/6/22 here. It is also on the author's blog here.