Protection
This suite of works contributed to ‘The Overwintering Project: Westernport’ in 2021, a project focused on Bunurong country / Western Port Bay’s internationally significant wetland and migratory shorebird habitat. In celebrating and mourning the natural habitat of Warn Marin, I reflect in these images, the vital interdependence between wetland vegetation and visiting endangered migratory shorebirds during their prolonged resting and feeding time in Southern Australia. Avicennia Marina (grey mangrove) and saltmarsh are the quiet unsung natural wonders of wetlands. Home provider, carbon sequesterer, coastal erosion preventer and water quality maintainer. Tough yet delicate, mangroves are one of the most important ecosystems on the planet…….Half the world’s mangrove forests are gone. And so too, the birds will be lost. Jan Parker 2021
No Matter How Clean and Quiet
I went out into the forest early in the morning before dawn, at dusk and late at night during a cold autumn/winter in the Champagne Ardenne region of France. I breathed in the cold air, the space, the silence and early bird sounds. One time when I stopped and was absorbed in taking a picture, I paused…feeling the silence change around me. The forest seemed to move and I experienced a visceral fear. The eerie light emanating from the nearby nuclear reactor made me feel uneasy. I knew I was unseen and alone but the uneasy feelings were unexplainable and real. Was I experiencing an Arcadian moment? At times capturing the particular time between day and night, (entre chien et loup) loosely translating to between dog and wolf, these images seek to explore our imagined origins, where the observed scene is dark and difficult to read. Forests, woods, landscapes are submerged into condensed, ambivalent feelings. Jan Parker 2013
Out on a limb
The exhibition ‘Out on a Limb’ features a series of new works that create a kind of conversation, softly spoken but assertively delivered…..Parker’s work alights upon the surface of things, allowing the rich, strange beauty of her images and objects to suggest the strong currents that heave and flow beneath. Her Slow Vista series of photographs in this exhibition contain ambiguous, semi-abstract fields of colour, ranging from soft pink to deep ruby, wrinkled and flecked with foam or fat. While at first glance the photographs appear to depict patches of skin or slabs of marbled meat, the images are actually of ocean surfaces gushing, spreading and frothing. Parker’s camera removes distinguishable horizon lines or significant detail, capturing instead the colour and texture of the water, in configurations that can never be repeated. The tight focus of her prints raises evocative register, playing with perception and expectation, whilst drawing symbolic parallels between the ocean and the body, an ancient connection that remains forever fruitful. ‘Out on a Limb’ turns the inside out, bringing a depth of perceptual and psychological inquiry to the surface and leaving us with the traces, the skin of things. Russell Storer 2006
Defenceless
Jan Parker’s ‘Defenceless’ at Centre for Contemporary Photography invites various questions of the nature or production of representation. In keeping with Baudelaire’s defintiion of ‘modernite’ the modern represented by an attitude to the present, Parker paints the space of Modernity as both transitory and eternal. ‘Defenceless’ and exhibition of eight photographic ‘paintings’ weaves into and against abstract and realist representation. Following on from the work of Gerhard Richter and the photo paintings of Charles Ray, these photographs mounted on plywood stretchers leave the viewer negotiating between defining the subject matter and the technique….painting or photograph, realist fragments of humanity or technological abstractions. The imagery consists of anthropomorphic forms and formations of balloons in different states. Parker’s paintly photographs are of both macro and micro depictions of both still life and moving shots. The colourings of cream, beige, tan, light green and grey allow the image to assimilate with the white walls, further implicating the viewer’s own presence and in some cases, non-absence. Human like in colours and textures, Parker’s use of deflated plastic surfaces ties dialectical points between the eternal and transitory, living and dead. Each image reads like a moment perpetually in translation, suggesting the very nature of desire and its morphing composition…the images leave mnemonic clues to a moment never specifically experienced. An unfamiliar experience in a familiar moment. “You two go that way” Larissa Hjorth in Broadsheet issue 2 1999
octopus 2
Jan Parker has used a computer to produce her work “Untitled #1” but the sensuous, visceral quality of the photograph returns the technology to the body. While abstract and ethereal, with rich, lustrous colour and texture, “Untitled #1” is strongly suggestive of blood and mucous, the central shape reminiscent of a blood clot or tumour. “Event #1” a blood spatter constructed from tiny drops of red glass, suggests a violent act in the production of the mark on the wall, an image familiar to us through horror films. The more deeply we delve into the body at a microscopic level, and the more we are able to mutate and transform it, the more destabilised and fractured our sense of identity become. Parker’s pieces are quiet and still with an emphasis on sustained looking. There is a tension between hard and soft, brittle and viscous, with both works, despite their ostensible two-dimensionality, exhibiting a sculptural gravity. Parker’s work directly yet elegantly references the interior life. Her examination of the body connects corporeal process with thought and feeling. The senses begin as a physical action, instantly linked by a series of systems and conduits to cognitive response. The tiny pulses and rhythms of the body are deeply individual and personal, and by taking the time to turn inwards, to look at and to feel them, we are perhaps able to recover a stronger sense of self.
“Octopus 2 Catalogue” Russell Storer Curator 2001