Gomma Photography Grant 2022
The Seven Circuits of a Pearl
Photographer
Ioanna Sakellaraki
The Seven Circuits of a Pearl
10 Jan, 2023
The series suggests a journey through the early Australian pearling industry; one of explorers, piracy, shipwrecks, death, wealth, secrecy and power. The story begins on the coast of Western Australia, where the Indian Ocean meets the Great Sandy Desert, and where peoples for thousands of years have shared a sense of fascination with pearls as objects of desire, combing the waters of the ocean in search of these precious gems which unlike others are the actual products of living animals; the mollusks. Like another living vessel of refracted time and memory, the archive of the journeys for pearls sails me back to the journeys of my late father as seen through his own archives during his time as a sailor. Captivated by the trove of an image of a woman with a pearl necklace found in them, I begin the journey towards the discovery of my father’s ex-wife and mother of a half-brother I have never met.Archeological, personal and missing evidence, become the thread between visual and textual material researched and further re-imagined though the mixed-media works, aiming at creating an interrelational space amongst the fragments of a larger narrative progressing from an investigative to a more esoteric resolution.
About the photographer
Ioanna Sakellaraki
Ioanna Sakellaraki (b.1989) is a Greek visual artist and researcher. Her work investigates the relationship between collective cultural memory and fiction. Drawing emphasis on the photographic object, process and encounter, she explores the boundaries of a primitive, yet futuristic vision of places and people. She was recently awarded a Doctoral Scholarship for undertaking her PhD in Art after graduating from an MA Photography from the Royal College of Art. She is the recipient of The Royal Photographic Society Bursary Award 2018 and was named Student Photographer of the Year by Sony World Photography Awards 2020. In 2019, she was awarded with the Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant in Tokyo and the International Photography Grant Creative Prize. Nominations include: the Inge Morath Award by Magnum Foundation in USA, the Prix HSBC, the Prix Levallois and the Prix Voies Off in France. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art festivals and galleries with recent solo shows in Tokyo, Belfast, Braga and Berlin. Her projects have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, Aesthetica and Wallpaper and journals including The Guardian, Financial Times and Deutsche Welle. She has been invited as a guest speaker in the Martin Parr Foundation and the London Institute of Photography amongst others. Her monograph ‘The Truth is in the Soil’ is published by GOST Books.
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