Denise Ferris is an artist from a small town of rural Australia and based in Canberra as Head of the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University.
Over the last twenty years, Denise has consistently made photographs in the Australian high country, the Monaro, and in Perisher Valley, the snowy mountains of NSW. These are landscapes photographs of a kind, but made in the surrounds of a ski resort - an island of white, which is fast disappaering. The work questions sustainability, environmental change, aesthetics and connection to place. Over the last decade photographs have been made during winters in Norway, Switzerland and Slovakia.
Interested in visual representations of the maternal relationship, mothering and the work of care Denise has presented conference papers disseminating her research on the power of photography in this representation. (See a list of conference papers on this site.)
Beginning with Given Grace in 1998, subsequent exhibitions centred on maternal issues, examining broader social politics and familial relationships. As a formal and conceptual strategy alluding to the complexities inherent in mothering, these works contain a combination of the nurturing protein of milk casein, with a poisonous chemical, dichromate. These are printed in sunlight using a nineteenth century recipe for a photographic emulsion.
Denise’s photographs are in Australian public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Canberra Museum and Gallery and the National Library of Australia, as well as international collections including the District Six Museum, Cape Town and Nara City, Japan.