Lucinda Bird

www.lucindabird.com.au

Lucinda Bird draws on ideas of representation, collecting and expanded bookmaking to create counter-archives that explore performances of power in vernacular photography. Having collected familial photographs found in junk shops, Bird zooms in on gestures of discomfort between bodies performing in front of the lens. Questioning the role of the body and the image in acts of representation and preservation, Bird translates these gestures through printmaking to create a counter-archive of leaky, unstable images, printed in graphite powder, and porous to time and touch. The translated gestures become part of an installation, paper flowing and draping over aluminum arches etched with text, acting as a spine of a book or a body. Bird opens up the gaps in the familial archive to redirect the central notion of the archive as preservation to show its counterpart of loss: lost moments in the photographic act, a loss of agency over the body in being pictured and physical losses in the archive through its process of selecting and discarding. Bird’s work asks us to question the nature of the archive, image making and the importance of our body in this interaction; pulling us in closer to view the materiality of paper, to encounter the information that makes up the image, and to bend and fold our bodies to read etched text under arches.