The passing of a relative who took his own life has been the catalyst for Steph Fuller’s photographic works inAwash. Fuller explains the title was ‘the only word I could think of during those three months to describe what I was experiencing, the world continuing while I remained still, most things simply washing over me’.
Meticulously composed and captured in a simultaneously dense and rarefied atmosphere, the images presented in the front gallery of FELTspace – Adelaide’s longest running artist-run initiative – are divorced from a possible narrative or chain of events. Instead, the viewer is encouraged to piece together the narrative through individual interpretation. The effect this has on the viewer is pleasingly visceral, encouraging us to take note of the finer details of the objects in frame.
One notable aspect of the exhibition that detracts from the sense of stillness captured in her series is the reflection on the glass from the natural light that seeps into the front room of the gallery. However, despite this distraction, Fuller presents an exhibition that is in equal parts elegant as it is economically sustainable. The utilitarian aspects of the work are an effect of sheer necessity; a recent graduate she candidly laments, ‘I just wish I could have framed with museum quality glass, it would have just broken the bank’.
The elegance comes from Fuller’s approach. Her photographs are of seemingly mundane objects like the bathroom sink but she plays on the concept of scale, choosing low angles to bring about forced a reassessment of what we see. This is also demonstrated by placing within the frame a small number of unassuming living organisms within some scenes to change context. Fuller explains that she does not support animal cruelty, but she included the dead animals and insects, ones we normally expect to see in motion, within the series to drive home the idea of stillness.
Overall the show had an uncanny feel to it. Freud conceptualises the uncanny to index the way in which experiences we find the most terrifying become so precisely because they once seemed familiar; he argues that this is related to repressed memories. Walking into the brightly lit room, being presented with a series of photographs of seemingly unassuming objects only to discover details of insects and other living beings created a sense of terror as much as it did stillness. The exhibition toys with our perception of the everyday and what we know and, in doing so, encourages us to immerse ourselves and inspect the finer details; to indeed see differently.
Awash
By Steph Fuller
FELTspace, 12 Crompton Street, Adelaide
www.feltspace.org
13 – 29 March
