Phantoms of Coles Broadway

March 2025

Photomedia series

Sydney College of the Arts

This surreal photo series was developed for my first assignment at Sydney College of the Arts.

Artist Statement

Frozen in my photographs are the night creatures which drift through liminal modern spaces. The audience is confronted with the unfamiliar; in the half obscured glance of an anachronistic figure; the slow shutter blur of an individual masking and unmasking; and the strange tableau of a ritual scene performed by gowned figures; in a supermarket lit by candlelight. 

I believe the supermarket, like many hypermodern environments, to be a strange liminal space, a resonating shell of signs and symbols. During the day, it is brought to life by the bustle of people, the movement of bodies, the social interactions; but once it empties out, the music off, the lights dimmed, its true unfamiliar form is revealed. 

In my photo media series, I take this iconic environment of a modern consumer world, constructed with marketing images and edifices of illusion, and strip back the layers of illusion and spectacle to suggest how the supermarket is almost a place of worship for the deified signs and symbols of our modern society. The central piece interpolates this idea through a ritual tableau, where candle light and cloaked figures create a jarring incongruity with the supermarket setting, and the focus of their supplications, a puppet on a shrine, hints to this idea of “image worship”. I further develop this motif of image and obfuscation through the use of masks and a slow-shutter emulation technique in the accompanying portraits, conveying that sense of confusion and loss of self in liminal spaces. 

The work elicits a sense of strangeness, of unfamiliarity and unease within a viewer, and encourages them to reflect on how places can become deeply unfamiliar in different lights.