Photographic Tunnelling

Emma Hamilton

1–18 Jul 2020

Photographic Tunnelling seeks to use ice core sampling in Antarctica as a framework to observe the historical layering of our connection to landscape and how it has been shaped through the lens of photography.

Using the premise of map tunnelling (programs that show opposite points on the earth simultaneously), and the process of ice coring, this project seeks to ‘tunnel’ through layers of landscape. Photographic Tunnelling takes a journey down into the earth through an installation of photographic ice cores and tunnels: through rock, sediment, salt crystals and ice.

Like photography, ice cores present us with frozen snapshots of time, a series of preserved atmospheres. Layers of temporal sediments allow us to move between two landscapes; the salt lakes of central Victoria and the snow capped lava fields of Iceland, two locations almost opposite each other on the globe.

Photographic Tunnelling furthers the artist’s ongoing enquiry into the intersections of photography and sculpture, exploring photography as object and optical illusion.

Emma Hamilton, Photographic Tunnelling, installation at Blindside. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Andrew Devine.

Emma Hamilton, Photographic Tunnelling, installation at Blindside. Artworks from left to right: Photographic tunnels (Victorian Mallee) I-VIII, detail, 2020, hand photo transfer onto Perspex, 25 x 25 x 4cm. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Nick James Archer.

we spent our lives confusing everything, like random shapes in dreams
Therese Keogh

Onsite, Exhibition, Publication

Overview

Acknowledgment

This program takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded - this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.

Biographies

Emma Hamilton is a Melbourne-based artist with a keen interest in the materiality of the photograph. Oscillating between sculpture and photography, her practice operates at the intersection between object and image. Hamilton’s work explores disparities between the observed and the recorded: the camera’s view of landscape comparative to our experiential, visual observations.

Hamilton was awarded a residency in the Australia Council Paris studio in 2014, and has since undertaken residencies in Norway and Iceland. She has held recent solo exhibitions at Metro Arts (Brisbane), Alliance Française Gallery (Melbourne) and Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne).