Rosslynd Piggott and Rudi Williams
Mirror, mirror, 2024
Sutton Gallery, Melbourne
Photography Andrew Curtis
The Exhibition: Mirror, mirror 2024
- [Sue cramer]
- 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]
- 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.
- [RUDI WILLIAMS]
- 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.
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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.
Photograph by Rudi Williams