DENISE FERRIS
ONCE UPON AN ISLAND OF WHITE
In the context of climate change, my winter landscape photographs manifest concern about the sustainability of a fragile climatic environment – a celebratory if cautionary tale. Photographs of snow summon thoughts of a faltering climate, predicting a shrinking ecosystem’s future crisis. Time haunts this series, the vision of this landscape itself predicated on cycles and seasons, as well as arcs of my past to my present. Time is running out for natural snow in Australia and inhabiting my work is nostalgia for its unique past and homesickness for its tentative future. Part elegy in the face of uncertainty, my work celebrates an island of snow already retreating.
My photographs describe a geographical and social locality, singular and unique. Perisher Valley’s snowfield is a work of wild weather and of corporate instrumentality, of meteorological chance and opportunistic development, a fusion of monumentality and banality. Crucial to my intentions, the resort is photographed as a working landscape where labour and leisure activity exist clearly side-by-side. The human use of place emanates from these landscapes, which are not simply spaces for vistas and views but places of human activity and pleasure. Nurturing an affective relationship between users and place is crucial to establishing deep thought about the future of Australian alpine spaces. Building a shared emotional investment through images that call attention to what we may lose and why we should care, is my paramount and abiding intention.
BIOGRAPHY
Denise Ferris is an artist living on the Monaro in country New South Wales, Australia. Denise is currently head of the School of Art, The Australian National University, Canberra. Prior to her appoointment as a lecturer in Photography she completed her doctorate at the University of Technology, Sydney. Denise has a long term interest in alternative photographic processes including milk prints and cyanotypes. The focus of her current research is investigating her archive of landscape photographs, which have been made over a decade in the Snowy Mountains near her home. Her work Celestial Spaces, a study of Kiandra’s abandoned goldfields, was recently exhibited in China. Denise’s work is in Australian public collections including the National Gallery, National Library of Australia, Australian War Memorial and Canberra Museum and Gallery, as well as international collections including District Six Museum, Cape Town and Nara City, Japan.