Wonderground Journal
Issue No.4 | 2022
My works takes me to places where a quiet magic resonates; where the water leaves the blood sparkling in your veins; where the horizon disappears and the sound of nothingness compresses around you. Places where you lie on your back and feel the relief of your insignificance under the brittle diamond stars.
In a conversation with American journalist Ezra Klein, author Richard Powers, whose books include The Overstory and Bewilderment, describes this feeling as one where the scales fall from your eyes. Moments where your sense of meaning shifts from an inward-facing self-narrative to a wider perspective which accounts for other ways of being. As he states: ‘when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence.’
In my creative practice I am interested in how I can facilitate acts of co-creation with these other ways of being; to give voice and visual expression to the more-than human worlds that vibrate around, and within, us. It requires surrender to the unknown. A dance of trust, where I break open the frame of the photograph and relinquish my authorial control. The materiality of analogue photography is a perfect canvas to co-create imagery; whether it be soaking film in ocean water, leaving negatives in beehives or substituting seaweed as a developer. The results are vibrant experiences of reciprocity where I am constantly awed by the logic behind the marks made by these more-than human collaborators.
When I exhibit these works I am similarly intrigued by the way they communicate with their audience. I’ve had various reports of visceral responses including crackling or tapping sounds, ASMR type tingles, the works reappearing vividly in dreams and eerie synchronicities, such as a work communicating a message from a loved one that has passed. I’ve come to think of these ruptured photographs as portals to a deeper frequency that resonates beyond our rational state. An invitation from these other ways of being to let the scales fall from our eyes.
Murramarang NP #1, 2021, archival photographic print from 6 x 6 negative processed with ocean water and hailstones.
Hawkcr, Murramarang National Park #1, 2020.
This image was taken on Yuin Country just after a hailstorm passed over my campsite. I developed the film on a picnic table by the beach using hailstones and ocean water collected from the site. It feels as if some of the storm’s energy found its way into the work. A kaleidoscopic presence hovering above a forest of spotted gums. Many people have had quite a visceral reaction to this work. It seems to communicate a type of crackling sound - perhaps the sound of rain freezing into hail?
Melt, 2021, archival photographic print from 6 x 6 negative processed with open flame.
The image was taken six months after bushfires passed through Bush Heritage’s Scottsdale Reserve, south of Canberra. The photographic negative was later exposed in the studio to open flame. To me, the heat of the flame reveals a subterranean energy, a deeper frequency that hovers beneath our rational conscious state, present when we centre ourselves enough to tune in. I have been very fortunate to spend time walking Scottsdale with Ngunawal custodians Tyronne Bell, Jai Bell & Phil Carroll while they conducted a post-fire cultural heritage survey of the land. Their care and attunement to Country has greatly heightened my own experience of living and working with the Australian landscape. — words by Sammy Hawker, edited by Georgina Reid.
