Adriane Hayward | Photographic Art

In order to make sense of a new place, I collected treasured ephemera from new friends. A small group of young women like me, in a small town. I asked to borrow some of their favourite personal possessions; trinkets collected from bedside tables, jewellery boxes and kitchen drawers. I then assembled these collected items and everyday objects they chose to surround themselves with in order to get to know them. The project aims to examine the main way we communicate in the modern world, by what we wear, buy and keep and the apparent significance of these possessions as cultural artefacts.

Getting to Know You documents my first impressions of a tight-knit group of women, who from the outset seemed quite similar. As I entered the private and personal spaces of the participants, individual eccentricities and vulnerabilities were uncovered. As I got to know them, intimate stories about themselves and their relationships with each other surfaced, and I found out what these individuals really thought of one another.

Reflecting on these discoveries, a dichotomy between the individual in their private intimate space and their place within the group informed the construction of these works. As I collected more and more objects from different participants, the complexities of these relationships forged over a number of years in the small community became apparent, and how these relationships shaped whom these individuals had become.

Finally, my object assemblages were scanned; allowing minute details to be captured and scales altered. Each participant was asked to write some text about their lives, giving them an unmediated voice to reveal likes or dislikes, hopes or dreams. After capturing these arrangements the treasured possessions were faithfully returned. New friends were made. In the end how I felt about this group of young women had greatly altered. I felt I was continually getting to know you.

Souvenirs, postcards, and snapshots impulsively purchased and performed by travellers and tourists alike are at once an attempt to capture a prized moment and to progress an idealised narrative. Photographing and consuming justify and structure a tourist’s itinerary. The retained objects and images are, however, arguably limited to a few recognizable signifiers, exotic locations, ritual experiences and iconic monuments. Evidence that we saw the “must see” and did the “must do”. The traveller inevitably returns home to present their collection. The mementos are proof of the journey and condense the multifaceted experience into a romantic script. Forget the airport delays and arguments over money. Remember the sun setting behind an exotic temple.

123 Days Away captures and reconstructs Aaron and Adriane’s rite of passage traveling through Southeast Asia.

Souvenirs become symbols of our experience, and our only physical reference to a particular place or time. Adriane disregards the ‘traditional’ souvenir, she is more attracted to objects normally overlooked or discarded. Objects like bus tickets, plastic spoons, miniature shampoo bottles and pieces of string are more revealing of a location than key rings, tea towels and t-shirts. Returning home, Adriane utilizes a digital scanner to transform her souvenirs into an intricately collaged narrative that questions both our perception of mementos and the truth of our memories.

As the male of a travelling couple often does, Aaron held his SLR close-by wherever they went. The framed fragments he presents us with are a combination of snapshots, commercial ‘lifestyle’ imagery, and ironic documentary moments that attempt to script an unconventional if not more honest narrative of the couple’s ‘rite of passage’. The added video function in digital cameras also provides Aaron with the opportunity to narrate stories in motion, or ‘snapreels’, and further confuse the reality of their memories.

Gleanings is a collaboration with my friends and family. They offer me once important ephemera now resting by bedsides, dormant on shelves and engrained into their habitats. These are old clothes, trivial souvenirs, bus tickets, jewellery, old birthday cards and exhausted tools. I assemble their possessions in order to communicate the transient materiality of human experience.

In revealing these personal artefacts I question the relationship between our identities and material things. We seem to have an incessant urge to possess and horde tokens of our individuality. Gleanings serves as a study of identity as discernible in the objects we keep, yet it intends to question whether we have control over these manifestations or to what extent they are imposed upon us.

These images not only provide an indication of the individual, but my relationship with them. My feelings are expressed in the aesthetic choices I make and the objects I select for the final representation. Gleanings proposes more than documentation. The collages ultimately express the subject’s own urge to construct a particular identity, in addition to my own perception of them.

The familiarity of the objects ties the images to our own narratives. We are reminded again of our own formulation, of our own construction of identity. Indeed, it is our cultural memory that these collages seek to interpret and reconstruct.

In Dressing Sophia patriarchal values of western religious ideology are subverted through the female archetype and indexical motifs within a layered media context. The collage of organic and decorative objects merges with a refigured female archetype. Symbolic references to biblical and Gnostic theory accompany the fragmentation and reassembly of self. Organic decomposition is frozen in the resulting photograph.

The works from Cut and Paste use the method of collage and are constructed from materials collected from the everyday. These collages are scanned, creating a transition from object to reproducible photograph. Organic growth and decomposition are frozen in the scan, creating a record of the ephemeral collage.

Although I consider my work photographic, the process has evolved so that I no longer utilize a conventional camera. A digital scanner images my collages and the final product is therefore a photographic print.