Hannah Cooper, Slow Pixels, Jennings Kerr, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Jennings Kerr, Robertson.

The flames tore through and across the bush. Destruction and the devastation followed, but from the charred ashes came the rainbow. The fires displaced artist Hannah Cooper and her family from their 20 acres but not before the artist was able to experience a rejuvenation that sparked her interest in natural dye. This was the spark that ignited her interest in the alchemy of the dye pot, the squeezing of colour from the world around, but also a new appreciation and respect, a different lens to see the landscape through.

Cooper’s land and cityscapes are a slowing down and an absorption of places and experiences in reaction to the immediacy and image saturation of social media. These works pose questions about how we relate to the world, as well as how we use images, and maybe, how do images control us? Did it happen if you didn’t post it? Did you see it, eat it, visit it, if you didn’t ‘share it’? Cooper is able to make her image in the language of the digital, the building block and structure of the image in virtual space. It is a clever manipulation in relation to her new lens, a digital blurring, the pixel represented through the analogue. There is a success in the contrast of the pixel as a digital expression of the photographic image with the analogue nature of its production. The reduction of resolution in the image is contrasted by the hyper detail of the weave pattern, it pushes and pulls the viewer in and out of these works.

Slow Pixels is a show that pushes and pulls the viewer, its weaving questions our understanding of time and our relationship to images of places, as well as how we define ourselves through images, perhaps in opposition to the places themselves.

Follow this artist