The Woods 2004

Summary

Siri Hayes often trains the lens of her camera on the landscape, exploring traditions of landscape representation and the ways in which we perceive, interpret and communicate an often-neutral idea of the land to others. She purposefully composes and frames her pictorial space to this end, placing within it subjects and other props that enable her investigations into art history and points of temporal connection. Take, for example, this Type C print made in 2004, in which the Wood family is placed in the dry, yellowing grasslands of Melbourne’s outer suburbia. The family members walk along and relax beside the loose-metal road that snakes through Altona quarry. Hayes carefully poses the Woods in this harsh landscape, two family members with umbrellas held aloft, and adopts for herself a distant and benign viewing position. It is no stretch to see this photograph as a recollection of the European Romantic tradition of landscape painting, also evident in the work ‘Crossing the Merri’, which can be found in the Art and Heritage Collection. The artist’s subjects are reminiscent of couples reposing and rambling through a landscape far more benevolent than the one presented here. In place of a verdant wooded landscape, peopled by a leisured European middle class, is a parched western suburban hinterland, which the (perhaps ironically named) Woods family determinedly inhabits. The photograph also radically revises the notion of a family portrait.