Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence, Bachelor of Arts (Photography) Sponsored by Sun Studios.
Ballarat International Foto Biennale GradFoto 2024 finalist.
SONG OF SOULS is a photography and audio-visual project that proposes hope for our collective souls to overcome despair over our fractious society. A hope for repair and re-balance. In my search for the collective soul I find hints in light that has travelled billions of years to reach us, connecting us since the beginning of time. There are hints too, in the human pulse, the enduring heartbeat of song. My project addresses the themes of human connection throughout time, represented in the ethereal and intangible nature of light, breath, filament and pulse. In this I express hope with light, countering the solemn darkness.
I am an experimental lens-based artist interrogating the two opposing forces of discordant and rupturing social structures and harmonious human and environmental co-existence. I work primarily with the mediums of photography, video and sound to explore ways to represent humanness inhabiting both the temporal and transcendent worlds. My visual expression is informed by feminist and environmentalist theory, my role as support worker in the homelessness sector, motherhood, and by my work in and passion for music.
instagram.com/lee_odonoghue_photography
Song of Souls
From the bubbling primordial soup of deep time emerges
the complex entangled threads of a world in balance.
Vascular, bronchial, rhythmic, milky,
bright, shadowy and hypnotic,
we are assembled with such orchestral physicality,
yet our souls have drifted so in and out of tune.
Discordant, fractured, greedy, wounded and alone,
we poison the air, water, earth and hearts.
We disentangle.
But. What of us?
We are within arm’s reach.
And I can feel your heart beating from here.
We are a sea apart.
But I can hear your heart beating from where I sit.
So I sit and listen.
I sit and I weave
the song of souls.
