Wouter Van de Voorde

Wouter Van de Voorde is a Belgian artist living with his family in Ngunnawal Land in Canberra, Australia. Raised in rural Flanders he is moving to Ghent to obtain a double Master's degree in Painting and Printmaking from the KASK Academy of Fine Arts. He started out as a painter before discovering that photography offered him more creative freedom and more opportunities for introspection than his original medium. In 2008, he moved to Australia. Influenced by his art academy painting teachers in Belgium and the Flemish school tradition, his photographic work creates haunting and mysterious scenes of the Australian landscape. He usually uses a large-format Linhof Technika V camera mounted on a tripod. The approach of his photographs is determined by the slowness that the use of this camera imposes on him.

 

The title of the work that has been published in photobook format refers to the family nucleus formed by the photographer, his wife Celia and their children Felix and Flora. Nucleo is a large, layered and somewhat uncomfortable family album. Unlike most family albums, there are few smiles and the loved ones are not in the foreground: they tend to disappear, blending into the vastness of the landscape. A family watching the forest burn, playing in the water and kicking up dust. They wander, doing and undoing things, and the landscape around them is as hostile as it is wondrous. A huge, alienated space in which you could simply disappear. The family forms an organic part and are both witnesses and sometimes intruders. Nucleo is a time capsule that transports us through an unreachable vastness, an ode to life in a house without a roof and without walls. Colour and black and white photographs in different formats where different layers and timelines are encapsulated. The time of the photo, the time of the viewer and the deep time of the land of Australia. The time of the Aboriginal culture whereby the land is a living thing and we are part of it. The landscape has always been here. Images illuminated by the twilight of the days, by the shy light of dusk or the uncomfortable intensity of the flash.

Photographs of the passage of time and its unattainable eternity that at the same time speak to us of the time of images, of their past and their future.