This landscape holds grief by Paula Mahoney
Finalist, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2022.
This landscape holds grief by Paula Mahoney is the inaugural Wai Tang Commissioning Award exhibition. Mahoney is the first artist to be awarded the $10,000 commission and was selected from the 2021 Bowness Photography Prize.
As part of the commission, one work will enter the MGA’s significant collection of Australian photographs in honour of Wai Tang. The award has been established by Wai Tang’s husband, Kee Wong, to recognise and honour her significant impact on the arts and preserve her legacy within MGA’s collection and exhibition history.
The exhibition is the result of a residency at Q Bank Gallery in Queenstown, Tasmania, in January this year and explores the relationship between personal loss, our history, and how grief can echo in the Australian landscape as an absence.
Mahoney’s work represents an ongoing examination of death and personal loss through the vehicle of performative photography and portraiture, frequently depicting herself, daughter, niece, and sisters, wearing clothes of dead loved ones. This landscape holds grief returns the image of death and mourning into public consciousness in a way that combines hope and despair.
