PhotoAccess exhibition features works by Sammy Hawker, Eunie Kim, Caroline Huf and Aloisia Cudmore

Each year, PhotoAccess gives awards to local and interstate artists, both emerging and established, assisting them to expand and develop their photo-media practices. They are provided with mentorship to produce solo exhibitions in the Huw Davies Gallery. The four ACT exhibitors this year were recipients of the Dark Matter, Emerging Artists Support Scheme, and Wide Angle residencies.

The works in Sammy Hawker's Experiments in Living [Melt] exhibition encompass text, documentary video and negative prints produced in collaboration with the chemical activity of rain, hailstones, seawater and open flame. This is now familiar territory for Hawker, who challenges us to reconsider the illusion of control we hold over the natural world. These images do not disappoint.

Because we are limited, finite beings subject to dying, vulnerability to trauma is a universal feature of our human condition. Hawker's images speak to this, identifying the importance of nurturing our relationship to the world, and reminding us that our everyday experience is illusory, never the reality itself, of non-human forces shaping our lives.

Eunie Kim says she is grateful to have found her life's calling in photography and is excited to see what comes next, embracing every opportunity. In Surface Appearances, Kim has used Liquid Light photographic emulsion, painted onto varied papers, and brought her current Australian life into conversation with the traditional aesthetics of her Korean heritage. This is most evident in three beautiful "paintings" on sugarcane paper, looking at flowers, birds and insects.

Using materials and subjects from a contemporary Australian setting while simultaneously conjuring the aesthetic of traditional Korean painting, Kim explores her immigrant experience. Applying the emulsion via brushstroke, on differing thickness and texture of paper, has produced varying works. They reflect her process of learning, regretting and then correcting mistakes, and taking chances.

Light Materials is a series of video works deconstructing and recombining film materials through a process of digital or analogue weaving. Through her work, Caroline Huf explores the exhaustion and reinvention of settler Australian myths about the mystery and threat of the bush.

Huf's work It's No Picnic disrupts Peter Weir's iconic movie Picnic at Hanging Rock, a key cultural expression of early colonial anxieties in the unfamiliar Australian landscape. Each scene is pulled apart, altered in speed, scale, and moved out of time to appear as woven patterns and twills. The film's pan pipes become an industrial sound and the threads slowly disappear, suggesting a worn-out myth.

And Let's Get Lost presents Huf's personal engagements with local landscapes, wearing dresses she created from strips of 16mm film to remind us of the often fleeting nature of our experiences with landscapes. The film dress unravels as she moves through the landscape before being fed through the projector and into the gallery. Both the dress and its experience become an ephemeral memory. Watching these works, particularly the digital video projected onto sandstone, is a mesmerising experience.

Aloisia Cudmore's works span multiple mediums including photography, video, sound and installation. She investigates the notions of intimacy at the threshold between physical and virtual space.

398 comprises personal black-and-white digital images in which Cudmore captures intimate moments of physical proximity with her friends, family and community, during a time when travel restrictions, prohibitions on gathering and ultimately lockdowns separated us emotionally from those most important to us. These quite simple images of moments are a testament to the people that keep us connected.

We are fortunate to have these four photomedia workers among our quality emerging and established artists in the ACT. It is no surprise they were chosen to receive the awards that led to these works.