Sea of Life

Michael Reid Northern Beaches is excited to announce Sea of Life – our first solo exhibition from the winner of the National Emerging Art Prize’s inaugural award for photography, Penelope Green. On view next month at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and now available to preview by request, Sea of Life was completed during a yearlong professional mentorship awarded to Green as part of NEAP’s $10,000 photography prize, now the Seed Prize for Emerging Photographers.

“Penny has that unique and enviable eye – a photographer with a painterly sensibility,” says NEAP’s curator and co-founder, Amber Creswell Bell. “A keen observer of Australian life in her Newcastle locale, she taps into something familiar and known, while also shining a light on details that we, the layman, perhaps overlook. I find her knack with compositions and colour particularly compelling.”

In Sea of Life, Green swims through scenes of sanguine oceangoers – women whose daily rituals at the Newcastle Baths and beyond the breakers have fostered a community bound by a collective yet solitudinous embrace of the elements. While serving as compelling works of social documentary photography from an artist deeply embedded in the milieu she depicts, Green’s images also transcend the everyday through arresting and disarming compositions that convey the freedom and bracing embodiment felt by those who live for the sea.

“For many of us, the ocean serves as a third space,” says Green. “A place where we go alone or with our favourite people to meet our need – or obsession – to simply be in the sea. My evolving practice, documenting sea communities and experimenting with abstract work, is performed on a nature-based stage. From the beach, ocean baths bleachers, or in a lap lane, I witness the interactions of all who, like me, have a compulsion to be beside the sea. Like every ocean swimmer, I understand the abandonment of self and bone-deep joy that immersion brings, and bear witness to the ocean’s role in wellbeing and community.”

Green triumphed at NEAP with her work Gil and the Moon, which became the springboard for her new series and will form a centrepiece of her Garden Gallery show. Capturing a friend’s ecstatic embrace of the sun and sea at the Newcastle Baths, Green’s work recalls the iconic beach scenes of pioneering modernist Max Dupain, whose lensing of Australia at leisure helped crystallise a national self-image as one bound to the freedom, optimism and salubriousness of the outdoors. Gil and the Moon feels like a contemporary woman’s answer to those indelible pictures – an expression of female joy, unfettered autonomy and elemental rapture at the edge of the littoral zone.

“Buoyed by the women who join me, I find the courage to swim far beyond the surfers, into the open sea,” says Green. “It’s here that the strength and grace of the sisterhood truly reveals itself, and it’s this nuance I strive to capture in my images.” Returning to the same seaside settings most afternoons, Green sensitively observes her subjects – local friends and familiar strangers – and the play of light as it softens, shifts and reflects across the water and built forms. “In a permanent state of flux, the ocean is our metaphor for life: challenging and rewarding in equal measure,” says the artist. “What doesn’t change is what it represents: a place of refuge and solace, a place to connect with ourselves and one another and nature. A place where we are reminded that we are all simply specks in the sea of life.”

For enquiries, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au