Description
OD Photo Prize 2023 | Shortlisted Artist
Rory King’s work [b. 1996] sits in the hybrid space between documentary practice and personal narratives fleshed out through an evocative and ambiguous visual discourse. Primarily shooting his work in black and white and driven extensively by traditional photographic techniques, King is interested in the diversity of the Australian landscape, the unseen personalities living on the fringes of society, and the tensions between nostalgia, melancholia and the sublime.
Artist Statement | “Shot over a number of years through love, heartbreak, loss, and joy, the images in ‘Come As You Are’ hone in on the familiar and close to home. Gently probing the landscape of Australia, my closest friends, and myself, this work functions as a tool for comprehension, a means in which to examine and process the peaks and troughs of my relationship to the world, the resonant joys and silent grief.
Hopeful, yet not without toil and sincerity, this work attempts to pin down moments worth remembering, visual documents that preserve beauty and pain with conscious equanimity. Shortly after the loss of an unborn child with my partner, my closest friends fell in love and shortly after, pregnant. Their baby is now a radiant source of happiness and delight in our lives, pitted in stark contrast to the grief my partner and I had experienced months earlier. These symbiotic oscillations of love and pain serve as the foundational inspiration for this work, important reminders to welcome heartbreak so it may, eventually, make room for joy.” — Phil Hill
_
All print enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
+44 (0)7769922824
