27 November - 19 January
Don’t Play on the Mullock was an exhibition of new photographic works by Donna Bailey. The series of landscapes from the central Victorian goldfields were inspired by Bailey’s desire to link her practice more intimately with the physical and psychological experience of living, in this place, at this particular moment in time.
While the artist’s immediate surroundings have constantly played a role in her imagery, they have, for the most part, been present as a subtext, with Bailey’s representations of the young taking priority. In this series, Bailey’s landscapes are shaped by the brunt of white settlement and goldmining practices and more recently by ten years of drought and climate change. The young figures have been reduced, almost minimised, against the trees, mullock heaps and wastelands.
Don’t Play on the Mullock attempts to amplify the unique physical qualities and strange psychological aura that exists in the pictured spaces.
Donna Bailey
Christmas Reef (detail) 2010
c type photograph
courtesy of the artist