Ms Juliana Swatko

I have always started on each new area of visual investigation by working within a particular set of parameters, decided in part by the selected means of image capture, which varies from one body of work to the next and the subject matter and by developing a repeatable system of capture, processing or manipulation, which is at first unpredictable and surprising but through testing and experience becomes controllable.

Every method I have worked with has in turn lead me to another set of experimental conditions that can then be explored, forming an unfolding series of works that are interrelated but that also move into new territory with each learning experience.

My love of colour and nature is the focus of the content of these images and like a gardener, breeding or grafting plants to create new hybrids, my photographs also bring together natural elements in similar unexpected convergences.

The images I am currently working on were made at three of Sydney’s Botanic Gardens; Royal Sydney, Mount Annan and Mount Tomah, the subject matter, that of unusual and rare plants found in the Botanic gardens.

Nature produces fantastic variations based on principals of genetic building blocks and this is the thought I have gone into this work with.

Just as small variations can occur in nature, leading to greater evolutionary change, this occurs in my images on a micro scale.

The resulting images are a visual immersion in the gardens producing an experiential sense of moving through the environment with peripheral vision of things, just as you would see when viewing a scene without a camera.

Some things are sharply in focus while others are almost subliminal when viewing the world.

The illusion presented by the optics of photography is that the world is sharp and precise all over but in truth vision does not actually work that way.

In making this work, many exposures (up to 30 in some cases) were layered over the top of each other, splicing slivers of time to produce images based in photographic reality but which dissolve into dreamlike panoramic environments of lush colour and texture.

The film, exposed in this way becomes one single image, which was then divided, scanned and digitally reconstructed and resolved into images which defy the documentary aspects of photography and move instead towards impressionistic, painterly outcomes, through the method of their making.

These images have the feel of real vision, where you only clearly see the thing you are looking at and only get a sense of that which is out of the area the eye is focused on.They also contain multiple angles of view, which create a sense of the eye scanning the environment.

These images are in a sense a model of what drew my attention when the images were made and are a doorway for the viewer into my experience and perception of the world.

This information has been contributed by Ms Swatko.