Baillot & Balfour Endowment Award the most outstanding final year student in photography.
Art-Centred Photography – Centre for Contemporary Photography Award.
Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence, Bachelor of Arts (Photography) Highly Commended.
Ballarat International Foto Biennale GradFoto 2024 finalist.
MY MUM IS A WITCH.
My mum is a witch and I hope she escapes if it’s not too late. In the morning she glares from her perch. She cannot move until she’s finished her Earl Grey tea. After school she’s hungry for knowledge but she’s only given empty plates. She’ll scrub them so hard that her hands bleed. Sometimes I even catch her sweeping in circles; round and round and round and round. Then she’s so tired she just sits in silence. My mum is a witch and I hope she escapes. If it’s not too late.
As a child, I watched my mother spend hours performing household responsibilities and duties. This domestic work is often unrecognised and known colloquially as the ‘invisible labour of motherhood’. Throughout childhood, I made sense of this through mystical fantasy inspired by my consumption of fairy tales and children’s fiction.
Inspired by these memories and fantasies, My Mum is a Witch is a collaboration between myself and my mother, Philipa Rothfield. Offering a mischievous rendition of a child’s perspective, the resultant imagery aims to displace conventional understandings of motherhood.
Throughout the series, I repurpose familiar objects drawn from the domestic every day, including tools associated with unpaid domestic labour such as brooms, cleaning implements, and kitchenware. Costumes are sourced from my mother and include longstanding items of clothing inherited from a lineage of maternal family members.
The work evokes a peculiar atmosphere, both staged and naturalistic, with theatrical poses located in lived environments. Masks juxtapose with the human form to create a shapeshifting being, ambiguous and open to interpretation. The mask is a vehicle of magical transformation, rendering the subject both mother and witch.
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