Internationally renowned artist Marian Drew, 51, lives in Brisbane, Australia, where she teaches photography at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Drew has been studying our cultural, physical and emotional engagement with the environment for over three decades. Starting out as a photographer, she has drawn extensively on her interest in performance art and drawing to bridge different art forms. Her images are deeply pictorial in both their use of flat areas of colour and references to art history. In her Australiana/Still Life series she has combined these concerns to create richly allegorical photographic still lifes featuring a wide range of native Australian animals.
Most of the dead animals used in the series were found by the artist on Brisbane roads. The butcher bird, for instance, was lying on the road leading to her mother’s house, still holding a piece of straw in its beak to make a nest. Wallabies, potoroos and bandicoots only exist in this part of the world. Their continuously diminishing numbers are a bleak reminder of our impact on the environment and point up our ignorance and lack of respect regarding the Aboriginal cosmology in which all fauna and flora contribute to the well-being of the country as a whole. Many of her photos feature landscapes of the Australian wilderness she has photographed on her travels. These idyllic scenes allude more to grand landscape narratives than to specific animal habitats, further emphasising the pathos of the dead creatures. The photos are pinned up behind each composition, forming a backdrop to the still life. Rather than offering a seamless Photoshop vision, Drew sets out to make visible the physical character of the various elements – such as the slight difference in the texture of the background photos. This is perhaps why she uses film instead of digital photography to create her images, stating that “there is little humanity in perfection”.
Maud Page, curator
Text from the catalogue-book “Photoquai”, co-edited by Musée du Quai Branly- Actes-Sud
