In her analogue black and white cicada photogram series Marg explores what photographic art making practices can reveal about the impact of catastrophic bushfires on the cicadas life cycle.

The cicada’s mysterious ability to regenerate in abundance after the North East Victorian bushfires of the last 2 decades has inspired her recent photographic art making practice. Most of the cicada nymph shells she collected were found in rock and tree root crevices along the banks of the Upper Kiewa River in late summer after various bushfire events. Cicadas possess an extraordinary ability first as underground nymphs to deduce clues about the trees, temperature, and the seasons through the tree sap they feed on and likely, when to tunnel above ground, shed their shells and emerge full-grown and winged.

Within the broader concept of the Anthropocene, Marg’s creative practice investigates catastrophic events like climate induced bushfires. These environmental disasters devasted trees and played havoc with the seasonal cycles. Marg’s work suggests such
events may have caused the cicadas to speed up their natural life cycle and hatch in abundance.

The cicada nymph and the photogram speak to each other through their unique reliance on darkness as a literal earthly crevice
space to develop. The cicada nymphs’ journey starts in silent magnificence, underground, dwelling in the dark. Likewise, a photogram, a photographic image made without a camera, relies on the absence of white light to successfully develop. Cicada nymph shells and native flora were placed directly onto the surface of photographic paper and exposed to light in the darkroom.

This unique process revealed the accidental and the unfamiliar that exposed the shells as if they were alive. The photogram’s variations of transparency in different objects also reveal unfamiliar and unexpected tonal silhouettes that echo the recent unpredictable cicada hatching patterns due to climate change.

In the darkroom, Marg’s work allows her to bring simplification and order to the profound complexity of nature explored through the cicada’s lifecycle. Nature is thus explored and exposed through the climate crisis that she is mostly powerless to control in the wider world. Ultimately, through catastrophic events such as bush fires, the cicada series shows cicadas triumphantly responding to the changes in their environment. Thus Marg’s work attempts to highlight the regenerative power of nature and show hope and optimism for the future.

The Cicada Dance lines II folio represents a long process of photographic exploration, reflection, and resolution. Aesthetically the sepia digital photograms show a playful, narrative quality. However, a story of tension and disruption has evolved. It revolves around the predictability of the seasons and the chaos that occurs when bushfires and drought disrupt the natural environment. The Jungian mandalas represents a process of internalisation creating a centring force that brings order to the chaos that ensures after environmental destabilisation from catastrophic events. The aesthetic quality and free flowing cyanotype compositions of botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) has also served as inspiration for these photograms.

‘Washing Line Shadows’ asks the question, ‘What can creative photographic practice reveal about gender roles in remote communities of the past?

Memories of the daily washing ritual typified by overflowing clothes lines on a remote childhood farm in the Upper Murray have inspired recent photographic explorations in light and shadow. Glimpsing through translucent white, starched sheets to see lines of clothing diffused by light, transformed into layers of fluttering abstracted shadows are vivid memories. Wire strung between wooden props served as rustic farm clotheslines.

As obstructors of light, shadows possess an extraordinary ability to give the viewer distorted information about an objects shape. That shape can offer a visual image highly charged with imaginative potential. As a child clothesline shadows were perceived as beautiful, untethered images that existed in a twilight realm somewhere between a rural woman’s mundane daily labour of washing and the utilitarian purpose of wearing clothes to keep warm. These shadow memories somehow came to represent the essence of transient experience. Within the broader concept of remote communities, ‘Washing Line Shadows’ investigates the isolation inherent in a remote community. Access to consumerism, media, health, education, and social interaction were and, in many cases, still are all hampered by isolation and remoteness.

This body of work suggests geographical and social isolation perhaps further supported the division of labour into traditional’ gender’ defined tasks. ‘Washing Line Shadows’ focuses on the production of photographs to reveal the sense of purpose, solace, and connection daily rituals such as clothes washing offered women within remote communities of the past. A conscious decision was to print in black and white as variations of transparency in different clothing shapes seemed to reveal unfamiliar and unexpected tonal silhouettes. These could be seen to echo more recent blurring of gender stereotypes relating to work and the division of labour.