Mirror, mirrorRosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
InterviewExhibited works

Interview:
Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams 
In conversation with Sue Cramer


Melbourne, July 2024 
Installation view
Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams
Mirror, mirror, 2024
Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Photography Andrew Curtis

The Exhibition: Mirror, mirror 2024



  • [Sue cramer]
 Let’s start by setting the scene. You are artists from different generations, and longtime friends. Your collaborative exhibition Mirror, mirror 2024 at Sutton Gallery in Melbourne takes its name from Ros’s earlier series of three diptychs Mirror, mirror I-111 created between 2008 and 2009.
  • Rudi’s photographic images capture the transient and ambiguous reflections in the mirrored surfaces of these works. Taken over a period of eleven years from 2013, these photos evoke, in distilled and evocative ways, the variety of interior locations where Ros’s works were displayed.
  • Can you each say a few words about how this exhibition came about and your points of artistic exchange?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
Yes, the project is very much based around our lives both individual and entwined. I have known Rudi all her life—indeed, you could say since before she entered the world when her mother, a friend of mine, was pregnant. One poignant art/life fact I recently remembered is that one of the vials in my early work Collection of Air 1992-93 was titled ‘Air near Annette’s pregnant belly’, which was the in-vitro Rudi. 
  • Rudi grew up around a bunch of creatives, (of which I was one), engaged in all sorts of art-related activities. I lived in an old unrenovated Victorian worker's cottage in Prahran for 25 years. I had arranged each room like a kind of constructed space or atmosphere, featuring walls of different colours, art collections, darkened light. Rudi has since told me that even as a young child she was fascinated with the spaces I had created. When I had to leave, she came over to take photos of the rooms. 
  • Around this time, I was invited by The Johnston Collection, as part of their ‘House of Ideas’ series, to make a house museum installation in Fairhall House, which I did in 2013, resulting in the project Murmur. Rudi came to take some photographs in Fairhall, specifically the interior scenes reflected in my Mirror, mirror works, which I had included in the house installation. This led to her photographing my PhD exhibition Cumulus (mirrored) in my studio and apartment in 2017, and then to her capturing images of my survey exhibition I sense you but I cannot see you, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2019. More recently, she photographed selected interiors of my studio and apartment. So, the process of developing the exhibition has been intuitive and organic, stemming very much from our lives, and our cross-generational friendship. 



Rosslynd Piggott, detail - Collection of Air 2.12. 1992- 28.2.1993. 1992-93 air, Hock Maple wood, glass, transparent synthetic polymer resin, satin, cork, cotton, sealing wax, cotton, ink on paper, keys, French viscose tassels. Cabinet construction David Poulton.

    • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
Growing up, I was fortunate to observe artists who communicate partly through words, partly through creating their work, and partly by constructing the environments around them. From a young age, the relationship between people and their lived environments has interested me, particularly the way these environments are often abstracted reflections of thoughts, intentions, and methodologies. I have early memories of Ros’s domestic spaces, which have always been like architectural paintings or installations. When I was in high school, I used a twin-lens reflex camera to create a series of environmental portraits titled Habitat in which I captured my subjects within their living spaces. Ros agreed to sit for me as a part of this series in 2011. Then, in 2013, when I was studying photography at the Victorian College of the Art s (VCA), she asked me to document her home of over 20 years before she moved out. I photographed this potent space both with my 5x4 and digital cameras.
  • Later that year, I asked Ros if, in a similar capacity, I could document her exhibition Murmur at the Johnston Collection. This is when I initially photographed the slumped mirror surfaces of two works from her "Mirror, mirror" series using my 5x4 camera. It wasn’t until 2017 however, when Ros asked me to document her PhD exhibition Cumulus (mirrored) that I made the next image. Using my 5x4 camera, I took another exposure of Mirror, mirror III, documenting the reflection in its surface. 
  • By this time, it became a pattern for me to photograph Ros’ mirrored works. Two years later, while walking through her survey I sense you but I cannot see you at the National Gallery of Victoria, I saw another chance. The work displayed in this exhibition was Mirror, mirror x 3 2008, which I photographed using my 35mm camera. Not until 2023 did Ros and I actually discuss making these photographs into an exhibition. We then made new photographs in Ros’s studio and apartment through the reflections in Mirror, mirror III, formalising a method that emerged intuitively.  
     



Rosslynd Piggott, Alfred Street, 2013
Photograph by Rudi Williams


Mirrors



      • [Sue cramer]
 I’m curious about mirrors—looking glasses—a perennial theme in art. What significance do mirrors have for each of you as a theme? Are there instances of mirrors in art from the past or present that are important to you?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
I’ve had a long fascination with unclear mirrors, historical mirrors that have lost their clear reflective qualities due to the oxidation process of the silver nitrate used to make the mirror surface. There is a very beautiful one in the National Gallery of Victoria collection that I remember seeing when I was quite young. It’s one of those objects that makes you draw breath, like a kind of shock encounter. (It is likely that some of these early mirrors are no longer displayed due to mercury content and the possibility of leaking vapours). Such encounters with certain objects, artworks, or places—whether built or natural—can resonate for a long time and then do tend to emerge as major influences on my thinking and making. 
  • During my trips to Venice, I have seen many hauntingly beautiful, darkened mirrors in palazzi and museums. They are like silent witnesses, absorbing and reflecting time and events, laden with memories and visions of time, their mercurial surfaces sometimes peeling off. Such mirrors carry both light and weight; they are no longer shiny surfaces in which to check one’s visage before public appearance. They have already captured vanities, secrets, fears, aging, and countless scenarios—the mundane, the dramatic, and those deemed important. They are weighted with these events, becoming like vessels holding time, characterized by a deafening silence.
  • Joseph Brodsky in Watermark: A Love Letter to Venice (1989), wrote exquisitely about his haunting encounters with dark mirrors in palazzi, their unreachable and ghostly qualities. The non-reflective round mirror has also been a non-deified and central image in the Shinto temple in Japan, signifying time, endlessness, and voids, emblematic of vibrational energy that connects all life.



Rosslynd Piggott, mirror reflection, Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, 2019.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
I like how mirrors take what is reflected out its original context, creating absurdity through re-framing, a little like a photograph. When a mirror or reflection is imaged in a photograph, an effect of mise en abyme can occur—like a picture within a picture, a doubling or self-replication—which can evoke interesting questions of space and time. The way mirrors are used in cinema to confuse the viewer or create symbolism is interesting to me, especially; Agnes Varda’s The Beaches of Agnes (2008), Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).



A still from The Beaches of Agnes, Agnes Varda, 2008


Reflections and Distortions



    • [Sue cramer]
Ros, the two adjacent panels in your work have differently reflective surfaces, each with its own mirroring and warping effect. Rudi, your photographs capture the reflections in Ros’s mirrors and yet visually take us somewhere else, into an indeterminate realm. Can you speak about themes of reflection and distortion in your work?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
Yes, I created each of the three Mirror, mirror works from 2008—2009, as dual mirrors. I was interested in the different qualities of unclear reflection. The palladium gilt canvas has a very dull reflective quality, like looking through fog—the viewer has to go close to the surface and still can only see a blurred self. The twin mirror is slumped and mirrored glass; it is a clearer yet warped reflection. The glass also holds oxygen bubbles and some engraved marks that appear like fractures. The two panels are positioned side by side in their tensioned differences, effectively holding a nuanced sense of time and space.



Rosslynd Piggott, Mirror, mirror no.3 2008-09. oil and palladium leaf on linen, slumped and mirrored glass, wood.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
Reflections can distort an image and can symbolize an atmosphere, feeling, or recollection that is potent but not visible or discussed. I think the way light responds to mirrors and reflective surfaces can be a metaphor for how people reflect and respond to each other. 
  • I see my photographs of Ros’s Mirror, mirror I-III (2008-2009) as documents of her placement of these works over time. In my mind, photographing the images that I’ve witnessed reflected in the surfaces of Mirror, mirror I-III responds to Ros’s gesture of collecting air in her quiet but intentional work Collection of air 2.12.1992–28.2.1993 1992–1993. When captured by my photographs, the reflections in Ros’s Mirror, mirror works seem to occupy a surreal space between photo-reality and painting—but for me, they are still connected to threads of memory through time and history.





Rosslynd Piggott, Collection of Air 2.12. 1992- 28.2.1993. 1992-93 air, Hock Maple wood, glass, transparent synthetic polymer resin, satin, cork, cotton, sealing wax, cotton, ink on paper, keys, French viscose tassels. Cabinet construction David Poulton.


Surfaces and Interiors



    • [Sue cramer]
Both surfaces and interiors are important to your works. How might you describe their relationship?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
A surface can be seen as an interior in itself; a collection or an accumulation of surfaces is the very substance and vibration of an interior space. Juhani Pallasmaa, in his beautiful architectural text The Eyes of the Skin (1996), writes about our sensual encounters with surfaces, and how these register in our daily lives, and in our internalised daydreaming. But then so did Marcel Proust, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Gaston Bachelard, and many others. The substrate of surface is so wildly rich and enriching, both sensually and cerebrally. The complexity of sensual contact, so powerfully elemental to our humanity and to human history, is something I fear we are losing in this time of digital flatness.



Rosslynd Piggott, studio interior, Chinese cork garden and temple,orchids. 2014.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
When I walk through museums with historic collections, I'm always a little intrigued when works are veiled by glass. The glass often distorts the details and surfaces of the artworks with reflections of the surrounding interior and the viewer. Yet sometimes this can set up an interesting encounter or suggest an idea for a photograph.
  • For example, when traveling in 2014, I visited the Neues Museum in Berlin to see the famed bust of Nefertiti. I recall the bust was located upstairs, placed in her own room inside a glass vitrine. I was shocked to see her reflection cast clearly in the internal layer of the glass vitrine—to me this seemed like a kind of purgatory, to be spending an afterlife staring at your own reflection. I was compelled to take a photograph of this, but photography wasn’t permitted. Instead, when I returned to Melbourne, I made a sculpture using a postcard of the artifact as a stand-in for the bust, resting in a miniature reflective vitrine.
  • To answer your question more broadly, interiors can be works of art in their own right that result from design considerations—such as how people move through a space, and what holds significance in that space. Surfaces are small glimpses within interiors which often capture the abstract residues of history—like a handprint on the window, a worn step made slippery over time, or a reflection or stain on the floor. Interiors and surfaces each contain the other, they simply require different viewpoints. Like the difference between seeing and understanding. 



Rudi Williams, Nefertiti’s reflection, Acrylic, mild steel, postcard. 2014.


Picturing Devices



    • [Sue cramer]
Do you think mirrors and cameras are inherently related?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
Yes, both are viewing and viewers. Mirrors fleetingly whilst cameras capture.



Rosslynd Piggott, self-portrait in Garden fracture, mirror in vapour no.1, 2016. Wheel engraved glass, slumped and mirrored glass, cast Murano glass at I sense you, but I cannot see you - survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, 2019.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
Yes, the logic of reflection is akin to the photographic because of the way light reflects off surfaces. Single lens reflex cameras have mirrors in the body of the camera to simulate a viewfinder. This is historically connected to the camera lucida, which was used to assist perspectival drawing in the early 19th century, perhaps earlier. The Daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839, is one of the first forms of fixed imagery (or photography). In essence, it is a mirror—a polished silver plate sensitized with iodine and bromine and developed with mercury. It has been referred to as a mirror with a memory. 
  • The logic of mirroring, which involves the inversion of information, is carried through in photographic binaries such as black and white, positive and negative. This logic is difficult at times to teach because it appears to be contradictory, but once students understand how the discipline of photography is rooted in trickery, they begin to understand its language.



Rudi Williams, Vatican Museum, 2012-201 6. Becquerel daguerreotype (triptych I), acrylic, mild steel. Exhibited in Echo, 2016.


Time



    • [Sue cramer]
Dali’s warped or melting clocks come to mind when I think about time in relation to this exhibition. What does the theme of time mean to you in relation to the exhibition Mirror, mirror?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
Time is demonstrated in the durational process of making the exhibition: while my Mirror, mirror works date between 2008 and 2009, Rudi’s photographs are from 2013 to 2024. The chronology is obvious, yet also a path of slow observation by Rudi of my mirrors as seen in various locations. Both Rudi and I are deeply interested in the histories and allure of past eras—objects and sites that have, and in the auras that remain perceptible and powerfully vibrational endured or partly endured in the present. It is difficult to articulate what this may signify or mean, beyond the fact that we all have lineage extending back beyond the many millennia of civilization to exploded star dust.



Rosslynd Piggott, self shadow at Ospedale, San Giovanni di Paolo, Venice. 2020.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
To take a photograph is the act of acknowledging that what you are witnessing will be important in the future. I see my photographs as threads through time and more specifically in relation to this exhibition, as an abstract depiction of Ros and my personal history and our dialogue.



5x4 reflected in Rosslynd Piggott, Mirror Mirror III, 2024. Photograph by Rudi Williams


Material and Process



    • [Sue cramer]
Neither of you has gone for any easy or shorthand options in making your works. Can you briefly describe your materials and processes?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
Although I primarily make paintings, over the years I’ve incorporated a wide range of material and processes for my object and installation works, as demanded by the driving idea of each work. For me, materials and methodology denote content. As an example, Collection of Air 1992-93 was a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Air du Paris 1919, which was air collected in a sealed glass pharmaceutical vial. In response, I collected my 63 or so samples of air in glass test tubes, which were sealed with cork and sealing wax, bound with thread, and labelled with ink on paper, drawing a clear reference and distinction to Duchamp. A long vitrine was then made to display the linear journey of the air collection. Each material was carefully chosen to denote weightlessness. There are countless other examples where content is embedded in my chosen materials and methods—from printed leather gloves constructed by a glove maker in Naples, to a model house made from sugar-cubes, or the fringed Japanese obi, cotton and silk, that I used to reconstruct 19th-century nightdresses. 
  • Glass and glassmaking have been of particular importance in my work since the early 1990s. I see glass as a material in flux—originating from sand, heated to become fluid, formed, and then cooled. It is both solid and liquid, strong and fragile, an exquisite refractor of light, with the quality of being there yet not there. I continue to work in close communication with expert artisans in their fields, whose connection to their medium is finely tuned, to realize some of my ideas. For me it’s important to pay this absolute respect to others' years of applied dedication and expertise, whilst acknowledging that my area of experience is in painting and drawing. Although, I have to say, along the way I have accumulated knowledge of materials and methods—their physical properties and limitations—by working in close proximity with such skilled artisans. 



Rosslynd Piggott, detail - Constructing Paris 1996-97. printed leather, synthetic fibre, cotton, painted wood. Glove construction- Antonio Murolo, L’Excelsior Guanti, Naples, wood construction- David Poulton.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
For me, printing in the darkroom is enjoyable because the process requires all of the senses, especially colour printing, which requires working in complete darkness. I love being stripped of vision in that final stage of a process that is typically reliant on sight, and instead having to use my senses of hearing, touch and muscle memory to complete the work.
  • The prints in the exhibition were made at Wet Lab, a new open access colour darkroom in Brunswick. However, one image was a pigment print made at CPL Digital because it required contrast adjustments that couldn't be achieved through hand printing processes. After printing I spot out dust marks from the handprints using water soluble dyes and a fine brush. 
  • I used two different cameras to make the photos in the exhibition: a tripod-mounted 5x4 view camera, which I used when access was possible, and a handheld 35mm camera when access was limited.



Rudi Williams working in the colour darkroom; Wet lab.
Photograph by Kiah Pullens, 2024.


Beauty



    • [Sue cramer]
Each of you has a keen sense of aesthetic refinement. I wonder what beauty means to you. Is it something that you strive for?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
This is a complex question—versions of beauty being endlessly various, contrasting, contradictory—the chaos of which reveals its own beauty. However, I have never shied away from, or been suspicious of, an object, place, or moment that I found to be beautiful, quite the opposite. Such moments can occur like a seduction, an ecstasy, a shock, a stillness. I am fortunate to say that I have experienced many such moments of accord in my lifetime—in front of art, in a building or in nature—in different parts of the world, and I experience them all (still) as moments of deep joy. It’s as if each of these moments is carried around in our tissue, forming the strata of our character, and way of being in the world. 
  • Beauty is like oxygen and is as necessary as breathing, whether it be grand or utterly simple. It can be found in the discovery of a lost object in an op shop, in a millisecond sliver of light, or in a glass of water at sunrise. It might catch you by surprise—in a Shinto wedding observed by chance in a temple garden, or reveal itself when, rose petals are poured through the Pantheon Oculus in Rome during the Epiphany service. Each of these moments is like a tear in the fabric of what might otherwise be mundanity. The not-quite-alive is given an extra dose of the vivid spinning molecules of aliveness. 
  • Oxygen—Beauty. Yes, I do hope to offer someone a moment of oxygen through my artwork.



Old trained wisteria vine
in the garden of Hasedera Temple, Kamakura, Japan, April 2018. 


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
For me, while making my work, beauty comes from flaws in the photographic process—in getting close to my vision for a work, but then letting the process surprise me and co-author the work. In other words, beauty is found when I accept loss of control and embrace a more collaborative approach.



Rudi Williams, Stain, copper, silver, acrylic, mild steel, iron oxide, 2018. Exhibited in Echo: beneath the cataract lies a stain, 2018. 


Nature



    • [Sue cramer]
Could you say a few words about nature as inspiration and as subject matter in your work, perhaps through such abstract qualities as colour and light? 

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
I’m fortunate to have grown up close to nature, gardens, and gardening, and I’ve had extended periods of access to places of wild and unspoiled beauty. From a young age, my siblings and I learned an innate respect for nature. We were given reign to play in wild environments—we understood that there were real and significant dangers, and that we needed to closely observe our surroundings. Again, these experiences become part of your fabric. Nature and the observation of nature, even (especially) in the city, become part of one’s instinctive and informative reflex. For me, this is inseparable from my notion of beauty as oxygen and sustenance. 
  • These days, growing orchids in my studio is a joy; their wildly carnal organs contained in Japanese ikebana baskets resembling a miniaturized jungle landscape. On many walks during COVID lockdowns, I hunted for scented flowers peeking through neighbourhood garden fences for the subject matter of my evaporated flower paintings. Looking up to the sky in all its changing nuance was particularly important at this time. Swimming in both pools and oceans, especially in cold waters, is for me an experience akin to a soul and body temple—the experience is utter radiance. My observations and bodily experiences of light and particle space has become the subject of ongoing paintings.



Rosslynd Piggott, Torquay, Wadawurrung Country, 2024.


  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
Like Ros, I have a strong connection to water and have enjoyed swimming in any weather from a young age. She and I have this in common. The first reflections I remember admiring were at the beach. When the waves pull back into the ocean and a thin layer of water covers the sand, illuminating and reflecting the sky. Light is a perennial condition of photography. Learning more about early photographic processes makes me interested in the chemicals I use in different processes and how these refined substances come originally from nature.



Rudi Williams, Sunnymeade beach, Aireys Inlet, Wadawurrung Country, 2021.


Discovery



    • [Sue cramer]
Lastly, what have you discovered through the process of doing this project together?

  • [Rosslynd Piggott]
It has been a beautiful process to open myself to Rudi's observations of my spaces through her unique vision and the reflections in my mirrors. This many-layered, dual observation has occurred over many years of our lives, like a strange and silent little dance, distant yet close. I feel grateful for such an interaction that has opened an unexpected window for further conversation around an earlier work. For both of us, these conversations and observations through our work will inevitably continue to unfold.

  • [RUDI WILLIAMS]
It has been a privilege to know and observe Ros and her art over a long period, and most recently, to work with her on this exhibition. For me, the process has emphasised the importance of quiet patience paired with decisiveness in the act of making. This is something I will remember when working not only with her but also with others in the future. 



Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams reflected in Mirror Mirror III, Rosslynd Piggott, 2024. Photograph by Rudi Williams.