William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize
9 September 2021 to 5 December 2021
Over the last 16 years, the Bowness Photography Prize has emerged as an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country. MGA invited artists to submit still photo-based media including analogue and digital photography created over the last year for consideration. Ballis' Serenity has been selected as a finalist in the award.
I’ve been exploring my heritage via the mythologies of the lost lands. My father was born in Crete, which I aligned with Atlantis. I started the project by researching a lot of the mythologies and explorations surrounding Atlantis and the story I wanted to tell was an amalgamation of Plato’s story of Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias (c. 360BCE), the history of the Minoan civilisation and the new-age concepts of Atlantis. It’s a story of a civilisation that was intensely connected to nature and the cycles of the year, but then lost their connection to mother earth and were instead enticed by greed and technology. The series is shot with a digital camera converted to full spectrum with an infrared filter. – Kate Ballis
