Artist Bio

Born in Victoria Park in Western Australia in 1950: Kevin Ballantine has worked as an artist and a university lecturer while living in the city of Perth with wife Joelle Cabourdin and children Remi and Alix. Kevin’s work has been exhibited in Norway, Finland, China, Canada and Japan and is represented in significant public collections including The National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Kevin’s work includes photographs produced; at Perth’s metropolitan beaches; in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia; the streets of Paris and in Sicilian villages while following Easter processions.

It is atmosphere I think that draws me to make pictures

atmospheres perhaps that I’ve known or perhaps imagined;

they must have promised something.

Artwork statement

In the summer of 1988, Australia began its 200th birthday celebrations while I was on the beach with my twin lens, Rolleiflex with a flash attached, imagining the end of the world. The Rollei’s leaf shutter aperture allowed for under exposures that rendered distant skies dark and leaden while synchronising with the flash that starkly lit bodies near at hand. The familiar became unfamiliar and the mundane, otherworldly. The flashlight gave graphic expression to the presence of a foreboding sun, herald of an impending apocalypse. In 1988 a hole that appeared in the Ozone created fears of radiation and health and environmental damage. And there were the American battle ships and submarines moored at Fremantle and Garden Island that too could trigger apocalyptic visions. And a young woman gazing at a beach girl beauty contest, stretched lazily like Dorothy waking after her trip to Oz. A journey caused by a change in the weather.

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