Available Light

The exhibition "Beyond a Big Land" was initiated to counterbalance more popular, cliched images and publicity about Australia as a "big' land relete with endless natural resources be they minerals, forests etc. The intention was to create photographic images that represented Australia as being the fragile, vulnerable country that many people see it as. In this respect the exhibition, although modest in scale, was unique as most exhibitions remotely addressing the same topic are historical. See: http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/countryandlandscape/exhibition_text.html; http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/oceantoOutback/Default.cfm?MnuID=3. Duxbury was selected by the curator, Stephen Wickham, to make work for this exhibiiton based on her previous work depicting fragile environments such as "Melt" 2008 and "Double Life" 2009. The exhibiiton was shown at a respected commercial Melbourne Gallery and was invited to be shown in an expanded form at the Geelong Gallery in 2011. The exhibition was supplemented by texts including one by Dr Christopher Heathcote, renowned local art historian. The images for "Available LIght" were taken at twilight, a difficult time of the day to take photographs due to failing light. There is no single focus for this group of 4 photographs, each of which depicts the same landscape taken from different viewpoints to elicit a different response. Blurred photographs are a contemporary theme in internatinal art - "More and more often images that are out of focus appear in both contemporary painting and photography" (from the exhibition "Blur after Richter" at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. And "Blurry pictures present their motifs in a state between apparition and dissolution, between memory and forgetting" as a continuity of research themes I have pursued throughout my work.