Exposição - Olive Cotton: Resisting definition, National Gallery of Australia, August 2023
Olive Cotton, Orchestration in light, 1937, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Olive Cotton, one of Australia’s greatest photographers, always resisted being defined. ‘I would not like to be labelled a romanticist, Pictorialist, modernist or any other “ist”,’ Cotton once wrote, pushing away from any attempt to position her or her work within an art historical category or style. ‘I would feel neatly confined to a pigeonhole, whereas I want to feel free to photograph anything that interests me in whatever way I like.’1
Rather than being contained or restricted by language, dogma or fashion, Cotton saw her work as floating freely, perhaps something like what she always maintained was the primary subject of her practice – light. You can see this at work in her photographs. A landscape Cotton photographed in 1937 – an accumulation of grass, air, trees and rocks – dematerialises and becomes an Orchestration in light. In the photograph The way through the trees 1938, a view of light falling through a forest of spotted gums on Yuin Country near Ulladulla, New South Wales, is completely flattened out, rendered an abstract monotonal study of soft all-overness. These photographs pictorialise the sense of freeness Cotton held on to as a framework for her practice throughout her life.