THE SURFACE RIPPLES

The Surface Ripples was an exhibition featuring a series of digital prints derived from original paper collages that explore the vitality of images – images as living things that impart a certain energy. The series draws on Greek mythology, ideas of metamorphosis and shifting forms, entanglements with the natural world, and the elusive aspects of images that cannot be immediately unraveled.

The works use found material featuring objects from classical antiquity, specifically photographic reproductions of sculptural artefacts that depict gods, hybrids, and mythological beings. These source images resonate with an unfixed quality, in part due to the nature of images that precede digital reproduction – bearing both the grain of analogue photography and the trace of mass-produced imaging, such as misregistration and halftone printing. Further abstracted and re-contextualised through the process of collage, vegetal, mineral, and cosmological forms intersect, accumulate, and diffuse across the artefacts. Enigmatic interrelations, new visual sediments and seams, the overlaying of living flora, and the complex play of surfaces, result in images that stir with a sense of life force and material trace, despite being flattened multiple times by the camera. 

Collages are always in movement, suggesting new symmetries and meanings; this idea is further emphasised through the subject of the source content used in this series, which reference stories of change and transformation, as well as through something beyond surface value alone: the sense of an image turning, resisting interpretation, and just on the cusp of slipping away.

The exhibition showed at Bargoonga Nganjin, North Fitzroy Library (Melbourne, Australia), from Friday 27 January – Thursday 6 April 2023.

The works in the exhibition are offered for sale via correspondences’ Editions program.

Kindly supported by Yarra City Council.