Title

Home Decorum: Denise Ferris.

Venues

UTS Gallery (8 April 2003 – 9 May 2003)

Date

(2003)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (NSW). Photographs

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

UTS Gallery presents Home Decorum, a solo show by NSW based artist and doctoral candidate Denise Ferris. The exhibition is an installation of photographs and prints that employ the nineteenth century technique of milk printing. This process involves the utility of the casein protein found in the curds of milk to form a light sensitive emulsion.

The works lie somewhere between a photograph and a print and are pinned directly to the walls. In the Wallpaper series the figures act out domesticities with rhythmic accord, in a decorative, elegant fashion. Soft silhouettes of women and children in repetitive interaction mimic wallpaper, toile and soft furnishing patterns.

Ferris explores the relationship of parent and child, dealing with intimacy and the overlooked toil of motherhood. Her frieze-like forms describe activities through narratives of discipline and physical and emotional nurturing. Ferris allows us to see inside the sensuous world of waking, sleeping, playing and simply being.

Alongside are intimate close-ups of the nape of a baby's neck or foot. The tones of pale pink and the peach-like appearance of skin evoke a sugary innocent world, with colours reminiscent of coconut ice and jersey caramels.

Anne O'Hehir (Assistant Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia) on Ferris' work, writes; "it suggests a time when the inventor struggled to hold the image in place". Her works often seem to speak of another time and place, an era when photography was in its infancy. The physicality of the image upon paper seems almost weightless, like a whisper or a shadow. Their fragile appearance likens them to relics or pinhole photography. They seem unfixed, as if in passing and no longer in the present.

Whilst evocative of dreams and memories the prints also carry an olfactory sensation, an odour that gently taints the air. Milk, the very substance that gives life is employed to create images. The mild trace of milk in the atmosphere allows for a rounder, more full experience. It surrounds the viewer and envelopes the senses luring them further inside.

Ferris deliberately steers away from sentimentality; the Home Decorum series is intended as an ironic take on the way the world still works. Ultimately though, it remind us of our life's beginnings and of the huge potential for loss and love. [gallery media]