Image: Leah KING-SMITH Studio 2018, digital C-print on metallic photographic paper. Courtesy of the artist.
This artwork is a digital print on metallic photographic paper and measures 110 centimetres high by 110 centimetres wide and is displayed in a plain brown wooden frame. This work is one of five in a series, displayed together and working from left to right is the final work hung on the far right.
In the centre of this particular work, is a black and white photographic portrait of a seated woman staring downward directly at the camera, resolute in her gaze. Her expression is quietly defiant, and she holds herself with a strength and a presence that captivates. She is dressed in a 1950s style blouse with a pattern of seagulls in flight and a checked gingham skirt. She is sitting on a wooden backed chair with her hands clasped at her waist. Her hair is parted at the side and is vintage in its styling with long, dark and soft waves.
Overlaid onto this portrait of the woman and appearing from behind the figure are clear skies filled with the canopy, branches and leaves of eucalyptus trees. One large thick trunk of a gum tree travels from the centre top of the work down behind the figure, whilst another equally broad trunk moves down the right-hand side. A large circle of light covers almost the entire surface of the work operating like the aperture of a camera lens through which light passes creating a silver and sharp reflective surface highlighting the metallic quality of the photographic paper utilised by the artist here.
The scene is finally enveloped in microscopic close ups of the back of three leaves, with the leaf stems and their intricate vein line structures exposed and placed translucently – like tissue paper – over the image revealing the figure of the woman and the tree-filled landscape and sky below. The central stem of one of the leaves lies diagonally across the surface of the work, running down the left-hand side of the woman’s face and through her midline to the bottom of the work.
This work from the series, titled Dreaming Mum again, draws on photographs of the artist’s mother that were taken by the artist’s father, a keen photographer who developed and printed medium-format black-and-white negatives. Using her photographic layering technique, for which she is widely recognised, King-Smith wove together different subjects to create these large-scale images with curved edges.
The artist writes: “I am drawn to challenging the camera’s entanglement with colonial imperialism, and the way the lens as canonical device interprets and filters worldviews. In my use of camera, mirror, scanner and photo editor, I choose to layer and sometimes distort multiple lenses and perspectives. By weaving photographic moments and places together, I am constructing a web of connections—of associations that expand the view, as it were, beyond the foreground/middle ground/background relationships of a one-lens perspective. I could say that my work is photography dreaming.”
This work is on loan from the artist for this exhibition.