To The Sea

Sharne Wolff

Ten years after a journey that took them around Australia by car, artists Narelle Autio and Trent Parke’s To the Sea captures that trip in images taken from markedly different perspectives. Autio, who is probably best known for her photographs of the coast and its inhabitants, has taken to Australia’s sparse interior with relish. Many of this series provide the viewer with an ‘insiders’ view of the landscape observed from within a moving vehicle. Blurred layers of brilliant uninterrupted colour are painterly in appearance and look like coded horizontal graphs. Clues to their locations are provided by the titles although some viewers will recognise familiar hues. Other images of roads stretching out toward the horizon have only land’s edge in mind. Even without using people as her subjects Autio’s scenes convey a strong human presence.

In comparison Parke’s heavily contrasted black and white images in print and book form are dark, mysterious and suggestive of stories untoward. A revisiting of his negatives after a song written by singer-songwriter, Eddie Perfect, sparked this version of the same journey. “To sum it up, I took a photograph, Eddie wrote a song about the photograph, I then made four books about Eddie’s song”, Parke says.

Until December 21

Stills Gallery, Paddington

Pic: Narelle Autio, Road to Gundagai from To The Sea, 2012 Pigment print, 67 x 98cm, ed. of 6

Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery.