Ioanna Sakellaraki

The Seven Circuits Of A Pearl

April 26th – May 13th, 2023

The Seven Circuits of a Pearl is a journey through the early Australian pearling industry; one of pioneers, explorers, piracy, shipwrecks, cyclones, death, wealth, secrecy and power. Positioning photography as ontological proposition within the nexus of collage, embroidery and the archive, the work seeks to build a way for dwelling through the landscapes of preserved personal histories, and cultural practices (the seen) but also infiltrate through the concealed sides of the same places (the unseen), and retrace their omissions (what is failed to be seen), by interrogating them whilst framing them visually as a dual form of truth telling and fiction. Maritime disasters, archeological, personal and missing evidence, become the thread between visual and textual material from museum collections, journals, diaries and memoirs researched, and further re-imagined though the mixed-media works produced, aiming at creating an interrelational space amongst the fragments of a larger narrative progressing from an investigative to a more metaphorical and esoteric resolution. There is a versatility throughout the imagery, shifting from black and white to colour, the abstract to the figurative, rerouting the viewer through existing and imaginary spaces. This is a philosophically engaged creative inquiry questioning not only whether humans exist in relation to history, but instead how to access and write the history of this relationship in contemporary art as an emergent response to an ecosystem and cultural heritage in crisis.