The Bowness Prize at Monash Gallery of Art is a pre-eminent award for contemporary Australian photography. It’s a hard one to crack, but this year I am chuffed to have been selected as a finalist with my triptych ‘The blazing world’, a series of works based on the tragic burned landscapes of the NSW South Coast in early 2020. Check out all the finalists, there is some fabulous work there!

In ‘The blazing world’ series, photographs of fire damaged bush on the NSW South Coast are overlaid with images of campfire, and of vintage ethnographic book pages describing Aboriginal relationship to land. This work completed in early 2020 draws on the catastrophic bushfire season in Australia as a metaphor for the increasingly dystopian modern global world.  Sadly, the dystopia now seems exponentially worse, with the greatest global pandemic of a century spreading like wildfire, in the face of political posturing and a parallel epidemic of fake news.