I Am Australian

I created this project for a Year 2 Professional Futures, UCA Farnham Photography project. We were placed in groups and tasked with organising a free one night Exhibition around Farnham, Surrey, UK.  Our group decided on Flowers as our theme and each of us created a set of works based around this. We held the show in Farnham Library on the 23 November 2015. We called our exhibit ‘The Secret Garden’ and I came up with the tagline ‘ The Secret Bond That Flowers Hold’. I came up with the idea, as it linked all our images together perfectly. Each of our different projects portrayed seven different uses for flowers and also the various emotions they evoke from us . Our projects ranged from Chinese Photographic Flower prints, Grave Flowers, Fashion shots in nature, Portraits of a couple -with their faces covered in flowers in the form of a story, flowers and plants found in small Urban corners of our world, flower themed product photography and my project below. We also placed around the exhibit space dried flowers and handmade paper roses.

I was in Australia due to a family friend’s wedding, so I had to miss 2 weeks of the 1 semester, when the group I was assigned to, came up with the theme of flowers for our exhibit. It gave me the opportunity to create a project around Australian flowers and my connection to the country. The flowers came first, the name of the project came later. I decided to link the flowers to the voices of its people and poetry fitted the bill perfectly. One of the flowers in the project ‘The Cherry Blossom’, is not native to Australia, so it fitted as a symbol of her new citizens from the old world, while the native flowers became symbols of Australia herself and her Native citizens. Both make Australia what she is. My family on my father’s side has been in Australia since the early 19th century (pioneers like many of Australia’s first European families). I am also half Finnish on my Mother’s side and was Born in Portsmouth England. My childhood was in Australia and my adult life in England, due to my Father’s work. So my heart belongs to both the worlds of Europe and to those of Oceania. I decided in this project to link the two- my love of Australia’s Fauna, its people and their histories and my connections to the country. The daisy-like flower placed on a gum tree bark and placed on a Pier floor at Pyrmont, Sydney, (originally an experiment, to see if it would work) , became a symbol of me and those that had gone before me, that make up my very being, as a European that classify himself as an Aussie Finn. This project was designed to convey these histories, as well as documenting Australia’s beautiful Fauna. This is an on going project. The work below is what, I have done so far and some of them were showcased in the Exhibit.