GALLERY 1
SPACE A
I HOPE YOU CHOKE
LAUREN BAMFORD
“The farm, to me a play-land, was to those who lived on it an onerous dead-end. Everything I observed as a marvel, was a back breaking chore to those who had to perform it everyday”
Peter Conrad ‘Down Home, Revisiting Tasmania’
I hope you choke is a photographic documentary of Tasmanian roadside produce stands and farm gate landscapes. It is a collection of photographs loaded with contradictions. A romanticised social commentary of a dying concept, despite the growing popularity and need for self-sustainable living.
These images are faithful and Australian. Even more so these scenes are unique to Tasmania. An offshore island of an offshore continent, regularly omitted from maps of Australia – a lonely and savagely beautiful place, severed from the main land by a rising sea level over 10,000 years ago. Such isolation produces an ache of self-doubt, a suspicion of solipsism that has the tendency to conjure an air of unease and discontent.
Will these photographs one day evoke a sense of mourning for our own selfish sentimentality, or for the lives and communities they consumed?
