Emma Crook, 'The return'
100 x 70 x 2 cm
Hahnemuhle Hemp
Edition 1/10 +1AP
$2250
 
‘The return’ from my ongoing, evolving multidisciplinary series “I hold this in my bones” is a reimagining and reframing of a slide photograph of my mother, taken by my father, as I sat with them, aged 13, in a tinnie on a river in a wilderness area in the far south of Western Australia. ‘The return’ seeks to explore the intersection of memory and landscape by incorporating a projection of the original slide photograph in the same location from forty years earlier. Standing beside the river, in the near dark, on many nights over the last four years, with my generator, vintage projector and screen for company, I have reimagined this portrait, shifting with memory, leaning into the idea that matrilineal lines and memory of place are continually layered and held within us; my mother now has advanced ovarian cancer, and so I try to return her gaze, to this river, to look once again upstream.
 
 
Emma Crook is a writer, poet and photographer living and working on Menang Noongar country in Kinjarling/Albany, Western Australia. She has an MA in Writing and has been published in various print and digital publications, including Womankind Magazine, Elbazin Magazine, Westerly and Plumwood Mountain Journal. She is represented by Blush Gallery for Fine Art in Kinjarling/Albany, Western Australia, and in 2024 she was a finalist in both the CLIP (Contemporary Landscapes In Photography) award and The Jury Art Prize, as well as Commended in The Mono Awards. Emma’s photography and writing often explores the layering of the domestic and the natural environment, as well as examining a life within, and on the edge of, isolated landscapes and bodies of water. Her work seeks to reveal how human experience, lineage and memory is intimately linked with nature, and the more than human, in both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes.