Lisa Sorgini’s series ‘Behind Glass brings attention to women’s experiences of motherhood and care. ‘Behind Glass’ was produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when large areas of Australia faced severe lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. Sorgini frames this collective experience through the personal, domestic space. Mothers, carers and children are photographed in their homes, captured through, or rather, behind glass. This enabled Sorgini to work while adhering to social distancing guidelines. When routines and institutions around schooling and nursery were absent because of the pandemic, women shouldered far greater levels of responsibility and care. While ‘Behind Glass’ concentrates on this unique moment in history, the series reflects Sorgini’s wider practice which focuses on the unrecognised but expected care given by women and mothers. Sorgini seeks to assert the importance of this care. The compositions, bathed in golden light, recall the grandeur of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Sorgini elevates her sitters and their situation, underlining the significance of their role and labour.
A Centre for Contemporary Photography exhibition

Touch forms the conceptual and sensory thread linking “Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”: Photography and Touch. The exhibition, titled after a line from a poem by the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, features the work of thirteen international artists who explore the expressive possibilities of touch through photography, film, and video. From tender gestures between loved ones and charged encounters between strangers to haptic engagements with materials, the artworks foreground touch as a mode of communication, understanding, and connection. Some pieces embed touch directly through the artist’s imprint or manipulation, while others evoke it more metaphorically and symbolically. Together the works reveal the manifold meanings touch carries for us. After the disruption of physical contact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Photography and Touch offers different perspectives on how touch shapes us as social, vulnerable, feeling beings and is a timely meditation on what it reveals about our common humanity.

Guest curated by Susannah Baker-Smith and Susan Bright. Featuring the work of: Katrien de Blauwer, Phoebe Cummings, Odette England, Sayuri Ichida, Jeff Mermelstein, Joanna Piotrowska, Patrick Pound, Clifford Prince King, Richard Renaldi, Carolee Schneemann, Melissa Schriek, Tabitha Soren, and Lisa Sorgini.