Good Together
Bondi Pavillion
Annabelle McEwen is an artist and educalor practising on unceded Gadigal Land (Eora/Sydney). Utilising contemporary imaging technologies with traditional printmaking and photography, their works exhibited in Good Together reflect on the significance of place as shaped by memory, migration and familial histories. McEwen is deeply engaged in Sydney's vibrant ARI scene: they are a current member of Our Neon Foe and Puzzle Gallery and was Chair of the Board and Co-Director of Schmick Contemporary in 2024. McEwen recently completed a one-year artist residency at the Waverley Woollahra Art School through the Waverley Artist Studio Residency program.
Annabelle McEwen, Amy Street, 2025, copper plate etching on Hahnemühle, 50 x 50 cm, Sliema, 2026, screen printed acrylic on gallery wall, 100 x 45 cm, Maria Bambina [Gaussian Splat], 2025, screen print on found ceramic tile, 50 x 50 cm
In Amy Street, McEwen delves into the vast internet archive of data and images to uncover personal narratives within found photographs. The images document the artist's childhood bedroom in Regents Park. Inspired by Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Elvis Richardson, the photographs were found on real estate websites, which archive the past lives and stories of domestic spaces. The work suggests that private memory has been surveilled and preserved within the digital realm. For McEwen, the act of etching the photographs onto copper materialises these images, solidifying their existence and the stories imbued within them into physical form. The ritual of printing the plates onto paper pays homage to storytelling as an act of writing and sharing. The work is both personal and detached: the images lie idle online, on physical servers, circulating beyond their original context. Through this process, McEwen extends the life of these photographs beyond their function within real estate capital, connecting them to their own personal narrative.
Maria Bambina is a rumination on the loss of ancestral culture and the collection of time and place through images. The work centres on a three-dimensional model constructed from a series of family photographs taken in front of the artist's grandfather's childhood home, Maria Bambina, in Sliema, Malta. Having moved to Australia after the Second World War, their Nannu, Godfrey, left language and culture behind in an effort to assimilate. Following his passing, members of the family returned to the house and gathered for group photographs in front of it. McEwen describes the experience as conflicting: the sense of disconnection from the place and its culture, whilst accumulating images intended to preserve it. McEwen collated these group photographs and transformed them into a Gaussian Splat, rendering the figures unrecognisable, unified and eerily ghostlike - as a reminder of our own mortality. The print pays homage to the trope of the printed family photograph; the use of a found tile references the industrialisation and heavy tourism-driven destruction and reconstruction of Malta under late-stage capitalism, paralleling the erasure and disruption of the artist's connection to their Maltese heritage.