The windmill is a part of the Australian landscape, familiar to anyone who has driven through the Australian countryside.
The windmill is used to pump underground water into a trough or water tank sitting beside it. One of the fascinating things about windmills is that they are seen in a wide range of conditions, from brand new and shiny to completely collapsed.
Windmills are one of the re-occurring subjects in my rural photography. Who knows, they might even get an exhibition of their own.
Melrakki is the Icelandic name for the Arctic Fox, the only mammal native to Iceland. Melrakki is also the latest project from renowned Melbourne photographer Joshua Holko.
Melrakki features a beautifully produced, limited edition book (I have number 5!), plus a superb print in an embossed folio cover.
The book features a foreword by Dr.Ester Rut Unnsteinsdottir of the Icelandic Institute of Natural History and extensive field notes by Joshua. Melrakki is the culmination of three winters of patient waiting to capture the magnificent images.
There are only 100 copies of this limited edition work, so if you want one, don’t mess about.
Chris Gooden and the crew at Seddon Deadly Sins have very kindly given me some wall space for five of my urban fragments images. They are nicely framed and for sale.
If you find yourself in Melbourne’s west, drop into Seddon Deadly Sins (148 Victoria Street, Seddon) have a coffee and try some of the excellent food. Say hello to Chris and the gang and have a look at the prints on the wall.
In June I took a road trip to the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. This was part holiday and part hunting for images to round out my next exhibition.
The Yorke Peninsula has a unique character in South Australia. It has rich farmland, many small ports from which grain was shipped and in the north some serious mining, mostly copper.
A lot of the settlers and miners came from Cornwall and Wales, cornish pasties are the local cuisine. Just kidding. The landscape is littered with derelict stone cottages and the towns have a unique character.
My exhibition of images taken at Jokulsarlon, the Ice Lagoon, in Iceland is over.
The prints have been removed from the walls and the Point Cook public art space has been handed over to a new artist. All the purchased images have been delivered and the rest put away.
Thanks to all who came to see my prints and a big thanks to those who purchased one. I sold 19 prints making it my most successful exhibition ever. And I am now in the Wyndham permanent collection and the Encore Events Centre art collection.
A very special thanks to Megan Evans and Nicholas Boseley for their advice, encouragement and support. Wyndham City provides a lot of resources to support local artists and thanks to all in the Wyndham arts projects team for the great work that you do to make Wyndham an artist friendly place.
Yes, the good folks at Wyndham Art Spaces have offered me another exhibition to be held in February 2016.
The exhibition will feature images I have taken at Jokulsarlon, the Ice Lagoon, Iceland during several visits. The images will be A2 inkjet prints (printed by me on Canson Baryta Photographique), and they will be for sale.
Thanks very much to Nicholas Boseley and the art team at the City of Wyndham for the encouragement and opportunity. This is a great community initiative to support local artists.
This is a sample image from the set that will be in the exhibition.
From time to time I go back through my store of images; looking for usable ones I missed the first time, or ones that I can extract more from due to new tools, more knowledge or just a different idea.
Recently I revisited images I took in the South Australian town of Marree during a trip in 2012.
At the time I was after a strong evening summer sun look, but wasn’t very happy with the colour in the shots. I have revisited them with new tools and some different techniques and managed to get them to be much closer to what I envisaged at the time.
Don’t forget to go back through your archives to find the hidden gems.
My clever step-daughter, Dr. Alix, has turned her doctoral thesis into a book, and it has been printed by Brill, a well-known publisher of scholarly books.
Her book, Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora:
“…offers an insightful reading of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These texts are set in Sri Lanka but also in contemporary Australia, England, Italy, Canada, and America. They depict British colonialism, the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, neo-colonial touristic predation, and the double-consciousness of diaspora. Watkins examines the problematic identities in this fiction, revealing them as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance.”
I was very pleased and honoured to be asked to provide a cover shot for the book. Alix wanted the cover to suggest the themes of Sri-Lankan women and colonialism, which is how we wound up on a very windy St Kilda pier early on a Sunday morning. The pavilion at the end of the pier had the look of a colonial-style building and made a good background; early morning put the sun in the right place for me.
After dealing with wind, flowing hair, people wandering about on the pier, people fishing in inconvenient spots and the odd stray dog, we made a book cover. And as a bonus, I got to photograph the elegant and charming Chatu Gunaratne.
In June last year I was fortunate enough to get a flight over Lake Eyre in South Australia. This is spectacular country and I was fascinated by the patterns and forms in the landscape from up in the air.
I wasn’t equipped for serious aerial photography, but I was able to take a number of shots that not only captured the vastness of the land, but also had an element of the abstract about them.
The image below is of the dog fence that runs for more than 5,600 kilometres through South Australia and Queensland.
I have just created a portfolio at 500px. I will be using this site to highlight collections of my favourite images.
First up, several images of farm buildings in Iceland. I never cease to be fascinated by the feeling of emptiness and sometimes desolation that these places and buildings create.