Photographic Tunnelling seeks to use ice core sampling in Antarctica as a framework to observe the historical layering of our connection to landscape and how it has been shaped through the lens of photography. This enquiry seeks to examine our shifting relationship with landscape photography in the context of climate change.
Using the premise of map tunnelling (programs that show opposite points on the earth simultaneously), and the process of ice coring, this project seeks to ‘photographically tunnel’ through layers of landscape. This exhibition takes the viewer on a journey down into the earth through an installation of photographic ice cores and tunnels, through rock, sediment, salt crystals and ice. Like photography, ice cores present us with frozen snapshots of time, a series of preserved moments.
The photographs that form the basis of the exhibition were taken on residencies in Iceland and rural Victoria. Layers of temporal sediments allow us to move between two landscapes; the salt lakes of central Victoria and the snowcapped lava fields of Iceland, two locations almost opposite each other on the globe. This exhibition tunnels between them photographically.
Photographic Tunnelling furthers the artist’s ongoing enquiry into the intersections of photography and sculpture, exploring photography as object and optical illusion.
Emma Hamilton, Lens (Mallee), 2017, film photograph, 60 x 40cm.