When photographer Harry Culy came back from overseas travel, he visited the place where he’d always felt a sense of belonging as a child, his grandmother’s farm.
But this time he felt instead an overwhelming sense of displacement and disconnection from his surroundings. From this feeling, his project Rose Hill arose.
Rose Hill (first exhibited at Parlour Projects) contrasts picturesque New Zealand landscapes, with empty, still moments in landscape. Culy started at his grandmother’s farm, Rose Hill, Maraekakaho, then explored the wider Hawkes Bay area on a ‘photographic road trip’. Inspired by the Gothic element in Aotearoa’s art tradition, the work explores the feeling of displacement, something he says is a ‘universal feeling among youth at the moment’.
Culy graduated with Honours in Photography at Massey University Wellington last year. He has already curated exhibitions and has shown his work in Australia and New Zealand, including a solo show, Event Horizon, at Parlour Projects gallery in 2018. Culy is the recipient of the 2018 Peter Turner Scholarship in documentary photography and has a small press photobook company called Bad News Books.
Until October 27 Culy's work can been seen in a joint exhibition, Blue Room, with Sydney-based painter Lucy O'Doherty at Millers O'Brien Gallery in Wellington. The two share an interest in daily life and domestic spaces. The works that make up Blue Room present a collection of 'psychological stages, questioning what may have happened, or is about to happen; hinting at ambiguous narratives, similar to fragments from short stories or poems'.
