PROJECTS

Sarah Rhodes is the recipient of the 2025 Wai Tang Commissioning Award. In response, she has created The inner sky, a new body of work developed through analogue darkroom techniques. Layered and luminous, these photographs explore the atmosphere of interiority and the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds.

At the centre of the exhibition is an image of a figure shining torchlight through semi-translucent paper. Neither fully concealed nor fully revealed, the figure casts a shadow that echoes the process of a photogram made in the darkroom. Rhodes returns to this image re-peatedly, remaking it through different layers of paper, translucencies and exposure times to consider how light can transform an im-age.

Each work emerges from a performative gesture: Rhodes cuts, tears and folds paper to create apertures between intimate and expan-sive space. Working with papers of varying translucency and texture, she explores how light moves through layered surfaces, shaping what comes into view and what remains hidden. The photograph draws the viewer inward, where the enclosed space begins to suggest something more expansive.

The moving-image work The Passage shifts between caves and the world above, exploring how place enters us and becomes part of our interior world.

Across the exhibition, shifts in scale alter the intimacy and intensity of the images. Some draw the viewer inward, while others open beyond their edges, suggesting an enclosed space can also hold a sense of vastness. The works move between these states, tracing an ongoing exchange between inner experience and the world around us.

Curator | MAPh Director, Anouska Phizacklea
Catalogue essay | Dr Shaune Lakin (available on the exhibition page of the MAPh website)

Sarah Rhodes is one of 12 finalists in the National Photography Prize 2026 at the Murray Arts Museum Albury, alongside Alana Hunt, Alex Walker, Amalia Lindo, Arlo Mountford, David Stephenson, JD Reforma, Lisa Stonham, Marian Tubbs, Morgan Hogg, Nathanael Edwards and Paul Knight.

Installation views of Australia's presentation of 'unsettling Queenstown' in the national pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023

Chamber of projection I2025
from the series Intimate immensity (after Bachelard)
gelatin silver print
125.0 x 100.0 cm


HONOURABLE MENTION Bowness Photography Prize 2025
WINNER Wai Tang Commissioning Award

This image considers the cave as a metaphor for the subconscious – a space where inner states can be felt and externalised. Inside a limestone cave, created using gelatin silver printing and hand-applied chemical processes, the photograph embraces surface marks as expressions of thought, memory and emotion. The pale stains invite the psychological to appear through the material. The branching forms – stalactites and tree roots penetrating the cavity – reflect the mutual influence between person and place.

I am interested in how atmosphere holds these exchanges, and how enclosed environments intensify our awareness. This work is part of an ongoing series that uses photography and process to explore the porous boundary between inner experience and the outer world.

The Passage (2025, 07:21 mins) is a poetic short film by Sarah Rhodes that drifts between underworld and overworld, tracing a journey through the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds. By drawing a parallel between the subterranean and the subconscious, Sarah Rhodes explores the deep, inseparable connection between people and place.

An evening Film Screening + Panel Talk featuring a curated program of films will explore the theme of connection to place, followed by a panel discussion with the artists.

Panel talk facilitated by TMAG Senior Art Curator Mary Knights

Featured artists include: David Stephenson, Anne Zahalka, David Noonan, Izabela Pluta, Sarah Rhodes, Troy Ruffels, Ellen Dahl, Dave Carswell and Martyn Jolly.

Installation views of the touring of Australia's exhibition presentation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 at Design Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania.

A series of events with First Nations artists and academics, alongside architects and designers hosted events to engage with the public to discuss architecture for a recovering country.

Sarah Rhodes' images and films toured with Ireland's Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 national pavilion exhibition 'In Search of Hy-Brasil' across Ireland and Scotland.
The works comprised of photographic works from 'A Surrounded Beauty' (2022), film 'Ingesting the Island' (2022) and film 'Inhale / Exhale' (2023) screened as part of the immersive wall in Australia's 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibit.

The Australia team co-hosted the finissage event, Seeing Each Other, with the Canada, Sami pavilions.

Curators and participants from the Australia, Canada, and Nordic pavilions engaged in conversations across three continents, focused on decolonisation and 'what justice wants'*. The de-institutionalisation of set-tler-colonialism and the potentials of Indigenous and settler-coloniser knowledges and practices to collaboratively transform spatial relations.

Two-eyed seeing is a concept used by Chief Charles Labrador of Acadia First Nation and introduced to wider audience by Mikmaw Elder Albert Marshall. It refers to seeing from both an Indigenous and Western methodological lens. We use this idea to think about how it might be possible to see one another through the historical violence that permeates Indigenous and settler-coloniser relations.

With a focus on global kinships and collective creative work the conversation will seek to share tactics for justice, repair and archiving for our futures. Collaborators include Indigenous and non-Indigenous archi-tects, artists and historians: Shawn Bailey, Ali Baker, Adrian Blackwell, Anthony Coupe, Joar Nango, Emily Paech, Sarah Rhodes, Simoogit saa-bax Patrick R. Stewart and Julian Worrall.

*Acknowledging the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, 2016 special edition Critical Ethnic Studies What Justice Wants.'

Correspondences between language and place in the highlands and lowlands of Scotland.

Insights embedded in the myths and materials of the islands of Ireland. Hauntings of colonial Queenstowns by a ravaged Country dispossessed of its First Peoplés. The themes and experiences of the Scottish, Irish, and Australian representations at La Biennale resonate between each other, reflecting the connections between their respective countries and histories.

This curatorial collaboration for the Finissage explores these connections via a perambulating dialogue across the Scottish, Irish, and Australian exhibitions, unspooling the themes of place, resources, and temporality within and between the shows, and weaving them across the spaces of La Biennale and Venice itself.

Film screening at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 2023.

Isolation and connection, self-containment and belonging are key themes of her work and intrinsic to living on an island.

Ingesting the island (2022) uses the road through the interior of Tasmania as a way of journeying into the interiority of self. Stories are paired with landscapes, each evoking similar feelings, to reveal how for those living in Tasmania, the island has become part of their psyche.

The stories are excerpts from conversations with people experiencing emotional, social or physical isolation in Tasmania, and are told by a single narrator. It is difficult to decipher where one story starts and the other finishes, suggesting that these are stories, both unique yet universal.

These narratives reveal that islands influence our way of being and are not able to geographically or psychologically change each other as our network of relationships are constantly evolving. Through this self-knowing and shared experience of place, we form our sense of belonging.

Creative practice PhD examining how the photographic portrait can reveal the atmosphere of islandness in lutruwita | Tasmania in the Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, November 2022.