Chamber of Projection II, 2025

This work imagines the cave as a subconscious landscape – a place where memories and emotions are held. Made using gelatin silver printing and hand-applied chemical processes, marks and stains are traces of thoughts and feelings floating, and written directly into the photographic paper. In the centre stands a limestone column with flowstone canopy resembling a tree inside the cavern. This stone-grown form blurs the line between geology and imagination, echoing how the environments we move through shape our inner worlds. This work is part of the ongoing series ‘Intimate Immensity (after Bachelard)’ using photography not just to represent but to explore the shifting threshold between our inner experience and the world around us.

Living and working on Lutruwita / Tasmania, Sarah Rhodes explore ways in which the natural environment can guide an understanding of one’s inner world. She uses analogue and experimental techniques including photograms and shadow-based projections, video and sound to explore the porous boundaries between the external world and the internal self. In 2023, Sarah completed her PhD in Creative Arts at the University of Tasmania on the role of atmosphere in a photographic portrait as mediator between person and place, and was one of five creative directors of the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. She hosts and co-produces the podcast Art Destinations on the relationship between art, place and belonging.