Jennifer Blau’s thirteen photos are now up in ‘In Profile’, an exhibition space dedicated to local artists in the foyer of Mosman Art Gallery. If, like me, you haven’t as yet paid attention to this small space, now is the time to check it out, as Blau’s subliminal treat is only up until 2 February 2025.
Between Me and the Sea can be seen as a lucid photographic survey of what Blau describes as the ‘liminal space’ between land and sea, but it is also very much about place and light, the intertidal space acting as a metaphor for the transitions of grief, impermanence and loss. These thirteen photographs are of, or taken from, ‘The Moorings’ Blau’s former family home which is cantilevered over the edge of the rock platform at Chinaman’s Beach. The view is, and will declare here I have seen it, mesmerising. The Moorings is an architectural folly, a piece of history, a boathouse repurposed to domesticity, a look-out point with a precarious tenacity, and a wily subject for Blau’s lens.
Here, we have thirteen photographs that, bar one, have Middle Harbour front, centre and, or, side, some six of these images play with thresholds; windows, doors, the veranda, and the way glass frames and distorts, and, like water, reflects and refracts sun and moon light. The photo image used here is ‘Smashed by Waves’ which gives us the mad washing machine of waves pounding onto the windows just outside the living room — with its implication that perhaps we are just a step away from madness or catastrophe.
Contrast this with ‘Clouds on the Piano’, a whole skyscape limpid and lovely in the lacquered lid of a grand piano that segues into the harbour beyond, showing us, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney ‘the music of what happens’. Blau also gives us a Pantone® range of blue, from pale aquamarine where a teenaged daughter floats, a little like Ophelia, and little like Obelia, through a cobalt glint of glassine, pixelated sea, to a perfect stretch of moonlit midnight blue. Mostly we are with Blau, inside looking out, or down, and with her contemplating in the end, her empty home.
That Blau trained as a photo editor earlier in life is evident in this precise set of a baker’s dozen.
We are shown the garden by the shadows on the front door, and only glimpse the whole place and its solitary perch from what might be the wrong end of the telescope. There is much to attend to in this collection, we are wavering on the edge on consciousness, like the two submerged rails of the old boat ramp going somewhere and at an impasse, we are under the opalescent movement of high tide, and we are balanced between the sea and the shore, past and present.
Photograph Credit: ‘Smashed by Waves’ Copyright, Jennnifer. Blau
Jennifer Blau’s photographic portrait “Forget Me Not’ from her ‘Patricia’s Room’ series, a study of aging and memory loss, was a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize. Her exhibitions include ‘Patricia’s Room’, ‘After Midnight’ and ‘Their Space (Teenage Bedrooms)’. Her ‘The 50 Book: Women. Celebrate Life’ is available directly from the50book.com and Booktopia.
