George Eastman House Acquisitions

We are delighted to announce that the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY), has acquired three photographs (below) from the series Thrice Upon A Time, by the Australian artist Odette England.

This accomplished series of photographs earned England the CENTER Project Launch Award (2012) and was selected for the Photographic Resource Center Exposure 2012 Exhibition. Also in 2012, the series was exhibited at the Klompching Gallery (June 6–July 20), the New Mexico Museum of Art and Galerie Huit, Les Recontres d'Arles Festival.

 Dad #12 (Right Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

Home is the center-weight of Odette England's (Australian, b.1975) artistic practice, with memory and forgetting being the counterbalances. Her photographs are fragile, contemplative and temporal spaces. She works with expired film, vintage cameras, damaged negatives and alternative photo processes; exploring the volatility of identity, emphasizing the unstable nature of the past/present and the parent/child seesaw.

 Dad #4 (Left Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

"I grew up on a dairy stud farm in South Australia. Falling milk prices and rising maintenance costs forced my parents, under the threat of bankruptcy, to sell everything and leave in 1989 when I was fourteen.

Twenty-two years later, Mum and Dad performed a kind of homecoming on my behalf. Every month for one year, from December 2010, they revisited our former family farm, wearing on the soles of their shoes a set of negatives I had made at the farm in 2005, when I took photographs of places where they had made snapshots of me as a child. As my parents walked the farm, the negatives became abraded and imprinted with local dirt and debris. The negatives were then returned to me, some so damaged they had to be pieced together with tweezers.  

This series is a movement of reclamation and transcription. Since I cannot work the land with my hands, I work it through the lens, and allow it to work the lens too, in a sense, through the tread of my parents. The dominant motive for this work is my longing for an idealized vision of home, for the sake of which I remove my parents’ agency, much as I feel my own agency removed. The resulting images mythologize my holy land, an inheritance I ache for. My parents are semi-supervised ghosts; I ask them when and where to haunt. Their repetitive, ritualistic motion helps me remember, depict, and fantasize". —Odette England

Mum #14 (Right Foot), 2012 ©Odette England

The complete Thrice Upon A Time series can be viewed online here.

Photographic prints are available as follows: 

Total edition of 3 + 1AP (available in choice of two sizes)

 27.3” x 36” image on 31.3” x 40” sheet

42.5” x 56” image on 44” x 57.5” sheet

Pigment Print on Museo Portfolio Rag

Purchase enquiries should be directed to Debra Klomp Ching at the gallery.