Botanical Backdrop
Solo exhibition, Stockroom Kyneton, 2017

Botanical Backdrop continues my ongoing intrigue with investigating the essential components that contribute to creating pictures and, in particular, photographs alongside a pervading interest in place and landscape. The new work stems from a video work I made last year that is also included in the exhibition. 

The video has a static frame and focuses on my daughter who is sitting for a pinhole portrait photograph. She also poses superficially ‘unaware’ for the iPhone video camera that creates the video work. The video length is the time it takes me to remove the dark slide that covers the film of the pinhole camera, open the shutter, count the exposure in ‘cats and dogs’ and then replace the dark slide. I was interested with investigating the issues of control that occur between photographer and subject; mother and child. I was also interested with how she could remain so impressively still and behave so well whilst also defying my order by letting her eyes, for a split second, flicker over to the video lens and observing the other technology (the phone video) involved with her sitting. I am fascinated with how this slippage and imperfections such as this can create cracks that generate a sense of openness and relief from the controlling aspects of the work. They point to the constructed aspect of the imagery.

Whilst photographic concerns were the primary interest when creating the video work, my new Botanical Backdrop photographic series focuses on another visual component of the video work: the fabric that sits behind Luella as a backdrop. Its square formation creates a frame around and blank canvas on which to consider the details that form her physical identity. It provides a neat square of shimmering-in-the-gentle-breeze negative space. In the series Botanical Backdrop I move the fabric from its position as insignificant background to being the primary focus. I foreground the background. 

The viewer is invited to examine the details of the botanically dyed silk cloths as interesting in their own right. For example the creases, colour and stains are delicately recorded and focused upon. The colour of each botanically dyed cloth is extracted from the leaves, flowers or bark of a particular place and so the cloth could be considered a type of abstract landscape. The coloured cloth retains a natural trace of the landscape it comes from in much the same way a photograph is created by light leaving a trace of a place upon silver particles.

There is a pushing and pulling from foreground to background with these backdrops. The cloths cover-up the wall behind them. They create shrouds. However there is minimal depth between the cloth and wall. In this way the cloths push forward whilst simultaneously hang back against the wall. In this way I am intrigued by the possibility of the viewer ‘activating’ the work. On their own the life-sized cloths are the primary subject and awkwardly come forward to be inspected but in the exhibition space as the viewer examines the work the cloths once again recede and become background to the viewer. Most likely unknown to viewer he or she mimics my daughter in the video work where they are primary subject complete with a shimmering botanically coloured silk cloth as their backdrop. 

Siri Hayes lives and works in Melbourne. Solo exhibitions include: Backdrop, Stockroom Kyneton, (forthcoming); Holding Still, Sarah Scout Presents, 2017; Back to Nature Scene,Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2013; All You Knit Is Love, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2012; Dredge (in collaborations with music composer Eve Duncan), Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2010 and Listening Portraits, Latrobe Regional Gallery, 2010. Group exhibitions include: Framing Nature, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery (forthcoming); An Unorthodox Flow of Images, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2017; Revealing Identity: The collections of La Trobe University, Bendigo Art Gallery, 2017. Hayes’ work is held in a number significant Australian collections including the NGA, NGV, Artbank, Australian Parliament House, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Latrobe University, Monash University Museum of Art.