Studio, Film, & Experimental Works
“Road to Nowhere”
Final University Project
I began conceptualizing my final studio project during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, my partner and I had been apart for over year due to international border closures, and it would be a total of two years before the borders would come down and we would see each other again.
As a way of keeping us both sane, I developed a project that would involve shooting the bottom half of a film roll here in Australia, and physically shipping the unfinished roll some 11,000km to Chile where my partner could expose the other half. This combined our two different worlds into a single frame of exposure without the use of any fancy techniques or post-processing, just some tape, time, and coordination.
Some of these images were displayed to the public during my final year at the Queensland College of Art, hand printed with traditional darkroom techniques, but many more of these photographs were hidden from view. My website is an opportunity to showcase these images that were never seen, that demonstrate the totality, time commitment, and connection this project provided us during a very dark period of our lives.
“Using double exposures that travelled across the world, these photographs bring together the everyday experiences of two people who continue to be separated during the global pandemic. Analogue film collapses this distance into a single, unedited surreal frame to create connection and visual closeness, underscoring their loss of control and technology’s failure as a substitute for true intimacy. ”
Sometimes mistakes in exposure or the accidental overlapping of frames due to incorrectly reloading the film produced results that were just as fascinating or beautiful as the ‘normal’ exposures with clear dividing middle lines.
“Road to Nowhere”
“the storm”
“And the world Curled in on itself”
These images weren’t displayed to the public, but they live on here:
The genesis of this project came from a film technique I had experimented with four years earlier, before studying photography was even a thought in my mind. The idea of double exposing on film is nothing new, but I had created these images four years earlier in a class about black and white film photography when I still studied music as the Conservatorium:
