No Photographs Allowed

No Photographs Allowed. Photograph and acrylics on paper. 30.5cm x 42cm.

Brief

A set brief from my Diploma of Visual Arts at NCAT: respond to a single word, GRID. No medium specified, no direction beyond that. The open brief is its own kind of constraint, the work has to justify every choice.

Approach

The starting point was a visit to Kata Tjuta, where photography inside the Valley of the Winds is prohibited. That constraint became the concept. Without the option to document, attention sharpened. The body took over from the camera, and memory became the only record.

The response was a hand-constructed concertina pop-up book pairing my exterior photograph of Kata Tjuta with a painted and gel-printed interior drawn entirely from recollection. The interior surfaces are not reproductions of what was seen but layered impressions of reconstructed fragments: partial, subjective, physically made.

The concertina structure mirrors the experience of moving through a place sequentially, one revelation at a time. The pop-up elements slow the viewer down and make the handling deliberate.

Outcome

A finished artist book that sits at the intersection of fine art, bookmaking, and conceptual photography. And, a secondary book containing fragments of photography and printed textures leftover from the main project.

The work was selected for exhibition at Firestation Print Studio and prompted intrigue and surprise.