Make Good  (2023) - A Staff Exhibition

In Make Good, an exhibition in the studio gallery at Leeds Arts University, I exhibited work from (re)mediations. '(re)mediations' names the broader collection of small experimental series that form the practical photographic research for my PhD. These series together explore and demonstrate the multiplicity and relationality that emerges in my attempts to answer the question of how photographic practice could critically evaluate and expand understandings of historical and contemporary spaces, structures, and forces of whiteness, in the context of British immigration in Australia.

My research, in practice, turned to folding and re-photographing as ways to problematise the singularities assumed by the often-representational spaces of photography. Exploring whiteness as an affective atmosphere, I moved to think with non-representational theories, questioning flatness and fixity as photographic tropes, and this helped my attempts to navigate the difficulty of understanding, visually, whiteness as a violent legacy of settler colonialism in the so-called Australian spaces in which I work.
The experiments of '(re)instate', 'monuments (for projecting onto)' and '(re)emerge' explore the bungalow and botanical as material manifestations of whiteness in my research context. '(re)move' explores the folds in photography, the absence of presence and presence of absence in the photographic, and the ambiguity of 'seeing' what might only be felt.