Light Source

Eva Fernandez is a Western Australian visual artist with a practice based in photography and digital media, and has also recently branched out into installation and sculpture. She completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts in Photography at Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW and achieved her Masters of Creative Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth in 2002, and since graduation has developed a strong practice exploring the Australian Identity and has lectured at Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and TAFE. She has carried out a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions as both curator and visual artist, including Girls on Film and Mix Tape at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Transient States at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria and We Australians at Federation Square in early 2012. In recent years she has undertaken residencies at some of Western Australia’s most significant historical sites, focused on the development of site-specific works for exhibition. These have included the Fremantle Arts Centre, culminating in her nationally-acclaimed terra (australis) incognita exhibition in 2011; Heathcote Museum and Gallery, resulting in 128 Days, in 2012; and Midland Railway Workshops, resulting in two bodies of work for FORM’s paper, cotton, leather, flowers, wood exhibition in 2013. Eva’s work appears in several major collections including Artbank, the Collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Janet Holmes A Court Collection and the Royal Perth Hospital Collection. In 2003, she was awarded the Award of Excellence at the City of Joondalup Invitation Art Award, and is represented in the City’s Collection with her work entitled ‘Suitcases’ which was acquired in 2009.

Eva’s practice explores Australian identity and culture, spanning various concerns including gender-identity, colonialism and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian history. This series of artworks was developed during a recent residency at the Midland Atelier workshops and in it, Eva has captured a series of native botanical specimens referencing the 19th Century photographic technique of Camera Obscura. These photographs ask us to examine our human relationship to the native flora of the area, manipulated and stylised to mimic early Kodak camera photography from circa 1889. The technique pays homage to plants cleared by early settlement and express the aesthetic beauty of the plants, but also recounts history, incorporating both Indigenous and non Indigenous narratives, and serving as a memento of an environment that has been changed by settlement.
“The series intelligently locates these botanic gems within a circular format, and colours the backgrounds in mysteriously dark sepia tones. We lurch between the seductive beauty of the flower forms and the sense of wonder that earlier migrants must have experienced.” (Jude Van de Merwe, Artlink, vol 34 #3 [2-14] / 95.)