TITLE: Packed Matter VI, 2022

My work explores perceptual boundaries of space in relation to parameters of thought, possibility and consciousness. At the core lies an ongoing engagement with questions of materiality, form and the nature and processes of perception. Material play is significant in constructing these images, with light playing a crucial philosophical, scientific and elemental role.

Recent work is driven by the need to pull at the margins and structures of photography, to stretch its potential readings and relation to other mediums. Weaving together photographic, drawing and sculptural practices, I am pursuing synoptic connection and ambiguous movement between digital and analogue realms, embracing photography as a malleable and evolving medium. There is something at play at the intersection of drawing and photography in particular – a cognitive coupling of mediums, with conceptual and philosophical roots combining drawing and photography at the birth of the earliest imaging technologies.

Packed Matter VI was made in the studio and on analogue film. The negative was scanned and displayed on a monitor, with the final work constructed by shooting my computer monitor with an analogue camera; embracing screen flare, hotspots and subtle banded pattern overlaying the screen. This work aimed for an open expanded pictorial nervous system, capturing a digital transformation, processed and captured through an analogue medium. Grain, the random optical texture of photographic film, now overwritten, transmuted with its digital counterpart.

I am seeking an original language that pushes at the edges of photographic possibility, creating spaces that can feel both mundane and celestial, and which often read as drawings.

AUTHOR: Ioulia Panoutsopoulos (Australia)

Adelaide born Ioulia Panoutsopoulos is a multidisciplinary artist working in Sydney. Intersecting photographic, drawing and sculptural practices, Ioulia seeks light, possibility and spatial propositions in dialogue with quantum and material inquiry, perceptual expansion and consciousness.

Ioulia holds a Bachelor of Science (Psychology) from UNSW and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Honours, from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. Recent solo projects include Candle. Collapsar, ANCA Gallery, Canberra; Collapsar, Hazelhurst Arts Centre; and Quanta, Interlude Gallery, Glebe. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and institutions, including at Murray Art Museum Albury, Museum of Art and Culture yapang (Lake Macquarie), Wyndham Art Gallery (Victoria), Home of the Arts (Queensland), Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Crux Galerie (Greece), Itami City Museum of Art, History and Culture (Japan), Galerie Kurt im Hirsch (Berlin), Alma on Dobbin (New York), Galéria Z (Slovakia) and 2B Galéria (Hungary) and the National Library of the Argentine Republic (Argenti­­­­na).

A recipient of the John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship, awarded by the MAMA Art Foundation (2018), Ioulia has been selected as a finalist for the National Photography Prize (2024 and 2018), the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award (2018), Wyndham Art Prize (2022 and 2016), Paramor Prize: Art and Innovation (2015), Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2017, 2015 and 2007) and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2019). Ioulia is the recipient of the Gallery Barry Keldoulis Award and The Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence (UNSW).

Ioulia’s work is held in the collection of Murray Art Museum Albury, O’Sullivan Legal, Sydney and private collections in Australia and Greece.