Olive Lipscombe 2019
Photographer | Awarded $8,823
Olive’s connection with the Shire of Mundaring is rooted in her family connection to the area and her working photographic practice investigating family bonds, representation, sense of place and belonging. In 1968, her grandparents travelled by boat with her four-year-old father as ‘ten-pound poms’ to Western Australia, settling in Mundaring and building a family home where her father grew up. In 2013 her father returned to live in Darlington. The time spent at her father’s home has evolved along with Olive‘s photographic practice. In 2018, her honours work investigated notions of family within a contemporary Australian milieu. Employing photography as a vehicle to re-visualise ‘family’ beyond the bounds of mainstream imagination, Olive looked introspectively at her own unconventional family model. This process included rifling through collective family archives which captured moments of her family’s life in Mundaring. Integrating these found family archives with intimate portraits, Olive developed a series of images that critique the mainstream idea of family while simultaneously reflecting her own experiences and connections.
“ I am connected to Mundaring via deep filial ties, where place nurtures a sense of belonging and identity.” Olive Lipscombe
With the help of this Award, these images formed Olive’s first solo exhibition Au nom de la mère, which took place at the Perth Centre for Photography in late January this year.
Au nom de la mère is a photographic auto-ethnography that re/presents the mother subject and the mother/daughter bond within a cultural milieu where the maternal experience is both ignored and feared. The photographs capture intimate and powerful moments of a personal relationship exposing the complex dichotomies and multilayered identities inherent in the mother daughter experience.
Drawing on my own understanding of the maternal as a daughter, I use photography as a tool to explore the paradoxically intimate and detached nuances of the maternal experience –pain, loss, love and desire – I visit this experience with a feminist theoretical lens that traverses and transgresses traditional representations of motherhood found in art history and reinforced through contemporary images of the Western nuclear family.
Au nom de la mère (In the name of the Mother) refers to my mother’s French heritage and maiden name du Bignon. This project facilitates an intimate reconnection with the mother which supports the process of legally changing my last name from the paternal to the maternal. The act of photography as a creative practice may allow for reconnection with the maternal and du Bignon name. The body of work of approximately 30 photographs will be published in a small photobook and shown in an exhibition.
Visit Olive’s WEBSITE.