Unlike her male counterparts, she astutely considered the unique shape of each body, building a reputation on her ability to emphasise assets and conceal perceived flaws.

In a similar way, contemporary female visual artists offer a distinct perspective on the world providing nuanced insights into the lived experience of women. Heading through Bendigo Art Gallery to see the new exhibition,The Costume Designer: Edith Head and Hollywood, visitors can currently enjoy a curated selection of contemporary photography from the gallery’s permanent collection. Casting a female lens on subject matter from the domestic to the imaginary, the new display offers a snapshot of the work of some of Australia’s most acclaimed female photographers.

Recurring themes link the works, including female identity, childhood innocence, coming of age, the complexity of memory, and the psychology and poetics of space. In Bittersweet and Passive-aggressive Annie Hogan captures the interiors of typical suburban Queensland dwellings that have been uprooted and relocated to make way for urban progress. Cinematic in their composition, they present a dystopian view of domestic spaces, not as sites of comfort and warmth but transient containers of anxiety.

Contrasting in tone, but also grounded in the domestic, in Carolyn Dew’s Stray series, decorative objects depicting animals, from the banal to the kitsch, are affectionately arranged in rooms of a house probing the relationship between humans, animals and the natural world and its representation.

References to adolescence, the theatre of play and the cultural positioning of childhood link several other works on display including the recently acquired whimsical Burning with curiosity from Polixeni Papapetrou’s Wonderland series and Deborah Paauwe’s Tiny dancer from the series Violet Window.

Probing personal and collective histories, several artists tackle the complex act of reminiscence, ever slipping between embellishment and reduction. In her haunting photograms, Anne Ferran documents the remnants of the lives of women and children in colonial Australia. Physically printing with clothes found in the places they lived and worked, Ferran attempts to memorialise their existence and contribution to history. 

The permanent collection display of the work of contemporary female photographic artists is free.