Jan Parker

We have renounced our sensuous bearings and have become so utterly cut off from the world of the curlew, the dolphin and the stone. There is such an urgency to this time we live in for renewing our bearings, for falling in love outward again with the earth. In celebrating and mourning the natural habitat of Warn Marin ‘Westernport Bay’, I reflect in these images the vital interdependence between wetland vegetation and visiting endangered migratory shorebirds during their prolonged stays in Southern Australia. Half the world’s mangrove forests are gone. And so too, the birds will be lost

This series is concerned with the dual ideas of Arcadia, shaggy and smooth, dark and light, places of relaxed pleasure and of primitive panic. The images were taken in the Champagne-Ardennes region of rural France during an autumn/winter residency

My concern in this series is with the constructed gaze and the conventions of representing landscape, in this instance through my responses to the cultivated nature of rural France. This suite of works involves an exploration through awareness of the passage of time spent in Marnay sur Seine, France during a residency at CAMAC Arts Centre. Utilising photography’s intrinsic relationship with time and movement I documented the subtle shifts and inevitable changes in the landscape in one specific location from day to day and season to season during my prolonged stay in Marnay. I sought to create a visual diary to emphasize my continued physical presence in this location through the altered space of time and light.

This series was part of a group exhibition ‘Strange Nature’ with Dena Kahan and Peter Lambropolous, connected by our collective interest in nature and artifice and studies of the complex relationship between human beings and their environment. My viewpoints on nature and the alchemy of light were at play here. Uninhabited, often myopic, cryptic in their placement and at times referencing the workings of the eye, in particular the after-image.

Site specific and utilizing little wall space Parker chooses to integrate the structure of the light filled space in her suite of photographs. These images are reflections upon interior spaces predominantly museum spaces with a view to the outside in an endeavour to create an atmosphere rather than represent a place. Parker is interested in the ways we experience interior spaces, both public and private, with a focus on the way light travels into the deepest interiors of shelters, scrutinizing spaces illuminated by natural light sources from doorways, windows, and other architectural openings. While the works are predominantly photographs of foreign environments, Parker is not interested so much in the identity of the location, rather she is counter offering a view where architectural and subjective details coalesce where a mood or sensation is conveyed distinctly from archetypes of context.

Jonathan Nichols 2004

Studies of the subtle shifts in textures, nuances and colours of the ocean, illustrating the poetry of impermanence present in watery environments. Their photographic nature is ensured as they are documentations of a never returning moment. But they also echo the motif of skin supporting and protecting the currents underneath. I am concerned with surface, scale and an expression of the transparent borderline between the human condition and the natural world.

Fictitious, uninhabited landscapes, myopic views of found objects, photographed and digitally manipulated to create new worlds, cryptic in their placement. Internal worlds or outer faraway lands? Referencing notions of the unconscious, the dream state, landscape as allegory for structures and functions of being.

The word cell comes from the Latin cellula, a small room. The British scholar Robert Hooke chose this name in 1662, when he compared the cork cells he saw to the rooms monks live in. These are my cellula, intimate spaces.

‘Hai Tram Tom’ (200 shrimp) A private commission researched and completed in Saigon, Vietnam in 2003, a sculptural glass installation representing a mapping of personal experiences and responses accrued from travels in the Mekong Delta. Through observation and recognition of the importance and reverence of the day to day fishing life of the Vietnamese people on this expansive river system, I sought to express the fluidity of motion and dynamism of their trade. Continually upon the river, these people work on floating shrimp and fish farms. The varied tendrils of the bright orange glass droplets are homage to the hyper activity of the bright orange shrimp. My experiences as a scuba diver also informed my wish to convey the beautiful movements through water of underwater vegetation. Jan Parker