MUMMUMMUMUMMUMMUMMUM

Eliza Hutchison

26.03.2022 - 07.05.2022


Eliza Hutchison’s work experiments with materiality and abstract aesthetics in an exploration of our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image. Placed firmly within our present cultural and historical contexts, Hutchison explores the idea of biography in which personal archive is both indexically abstracted with and enmeshed in the narrative of mass culture as an alternative to traditional self-portraiture.

Hutchison's work uses the archive as a generative tool to investigate ideas of collective consciousness and personal histories. Her most recent works address the digital reception of imagery and the fluid formation of consciousness, amalgamating the personal and political on the same interface.

MUMMUMMUMUMMUMMUMMUM, 2021-22, is a large scale multi-image work that explores the notion of a “generative visual biography.” Initiated during the artist’s residency at the Victorian Parliament, the work comprises 16+ composite images which reference the form of early socio-political/narrative works, such as the Trajan's column and the Bayeux Tapestry. Through the process of collage, reconfiguration and sequencing, the installation intersperses imagery of the environmental protest marches in Victoria in 2019 and autobiographical text messages from her child/teen’s oft sent familial protests and aphorisms. Hutchison’s MUMMUMMUMUMMUMMUMMUM, 2021-22, explores her own account of motherhood set against the contemporary climate movement, where the mother is at once environmental and human. These intimate ideas of mothering, anxiety and discontent are explored here in relation to broader socio-political contexts. Conceived much like poetry, the works construct an idiosyncratic visualisation of a ‘personal yet collective self’, a revealing mirror that forms a highly fractured narrative.



Eliza Hutchison was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and currently lives and works in Melbourne. Hutchison was educated at UNSW and RMIT Melbourne where she studied film, sculpture and photography.  Hutchison’s recent exhibitions include Photo 2021, Victorian Parliament Commission; The National, curated by Isobel Parker Phillip, 2019; Image Reader, Centre of Contemporary Photography curated by Made Spencer-Castle, 2019; Balnaves Contemporary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated by Natasha Bullock, 2013; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, 2013.

Images courtesy Christo Crocker and the artist

Press:
KubaParis
SCANDALE Project

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