Rachael Ireland
Winner 2010
Download Rachael's curriculum vitae:
Artist Statement
I am an emerging photographic artist currently based in Newcastle, NSW.
Driven by my preoccupation with the idea of home, my photographic art practice is concerned with how people create home and how it mediates their relationship with the surrounding environment. My work takes its departure from the cultural implications of how the house and garden functioned in Australia to separate and protect early non-Indigenous occupants from what was an unfamiliar land; confining them in their imported sense of home. I use the camera to negotiate this lingering barrier between home and country.
The layered photographic imagery I create is contemplation on how people have, and continue to encounter and engage with unfamiliar environments and, alternatively, how people allow these environments to infiltrate their home, particularly in contemporary urbanised society.
More information about Rachael's work can be found on her website.