sticks and stones - Holly Treadaway
HUW DAVIES GALLERY 22 July–8 August
Each year we select graduates from the Canberra Institute of Technology and the ANU School of Art for PhotoAccess emerging artist residencies. The intention is to assist those artists, mostly young and with limited exhibition experience, to develop and present new work in HUW DAVIES GALLERY exhibitions. The residency projects can involve mentoring, courses, access to facilities and equipment and, towards the end of each residency, exhibition opportunities in solo or group shows. The exhibitions are assisted by funding under the ACT component of the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy.
From the 2009 CIT graduating year we offered Holly Treadway and Jamila Toderas residencies and, unusually, both accepted. Jamila’s exhibition, 'In my nightmares', is showing alongside Holly’s in the first emerging artists exhibition by CIT graduates for some years. We hope others will follow their lead. Holly and Jamila are showing new work made specifically for these exhibitions.
Holly Treadaway works as a freelance photographer in the ACT and Southern Highlands. She spent three years at The Canberra Times as a photojournalist and had responsibility for photography in other publications, including The Canberra Chronicle, The Queanbeyan Age, The Canberra Centre Magazine, See Canberra Magazine, and Summer in the City Magazine.
Earlier this year Holly embarked on a personal photographic journey through Laos and Vietnam. Her first solo exhibition Watching You Watching Me is currently showing at Café Yala, Reid CIT campus.
Holly Treadaway’s 'sticks and stones' is autobiographical, with its roots in the memory of her early years. It is a physical and emotional revisiting of the places and feelings she experienced growing up on the land at Burra, out of Canberra.
Using a model to suggest a reflective, idyllic adolescence, Holly recreates the atmosphere and quiet joy of a life which was at times resented but now, reconsidered, approaches perfection. The calm of this young Holly Treadaway does seem in conflict with the rambunctious life she recounts in her Artist Statement, but it is the big memories that ultimately matter and the taunts and isolation she sometimes experienced now take a lowly position in her evaluation of her early life.
PhotoAccess is proud to have helped bring this story by Holly Treadaway, an exciting young artist, to a wider Canberra audience through the 2010 emerging artist residency and her 'sticks and stones' exhibition in the HUW DAVIES GALLERY at the Manuka Arts Centre.
David Chalker
