Lee Vanderslink
I was born in Tasmania and started school in Strahan on the West Coast, so the visit to Queenstown was a walk down memory lane for me and in particular the train ride from Queenstown to Strahan. This trip I remember taking with my Mother once, when I was five or six years old. When I left school I told Dad I wanted to study Art and his reply was ‘Get a real job!’ so I started nursing. However, my passion has always been within the fine arts and I realized my dream completing a Batchelor of Fine Arts in 1993 at the Launceston campus. Life has had its twists and turns and I have since found myself moving and living on Bruny Island. This move enabled me to begin studying again and I completed a Masters in Art, Design and Environment last year. The research I commenced in Masters has stirred an interest into the mnemonics of photography and what the photograph represents. I am at present continuing my studies at university and working part time.
The photograph or memory-image is the physical evidence of a moment in time and a record of an event or a person. It hints to a past that is no longer present and at the same time, reminds us of our own mortality. These images were taken within the historic Empire Hotel, one of the towns old icons built in Queenstown in 1901. The Empire boasts of a beautiful staircase, which is National Trust? listed and was constructed from Tasmanian black-wood, sourced from the west coast. Its dinning room is reminiscent of the days when men sporting hats in hand escorted corseted, small waisted women to the table. Using old, found photographs, I have created a dialogue between the people within the images and the environment in which they have been photographed; conjuring imagined social situations from the past. Considering reflections found within the dinning room and hall of the hotel, I have delved deeper within the image’s surface to replicate some of the hotel’s imagined historical and personal secrets…if only the walls could talk!
Design by Mexico and modified by Linden Langdon
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