Artist Talk | Death Masks and Glaciers:
Rebecca Wickham


photo access

Rebecca Wickham, Pizol Glacier, Death Mask (triptych), 2024

Join Rebecca Wickham in the gallery as she discusses her exhibition Once Was and provides insight into her artistic practice.

11am Saturday, 31 January at photo access

How do we mourn for more-than-human loss, when all that remains is empty space? ‘Once Was’ explores the hollow land left behind when glaciers melt, and the grief and guilt that coalesces in the bare earth is revealed by their erasure.

Images recording sites of glacier loss sit alongside a series of death masks, made with the earth, rock and meltwater collected from each site, and cast from a mould of the artist’s own face. A memorial photograph pre-photography, the death mask acts as an object of grief and remembrance, the haunting of a presence no longer there. Here, it ties our fate together with that of our glaciers – the Earth’s skin is our skin too. These images speak to our entanglement with, and responsibility for, these sites of loss, an elegy and prophecy both.

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Artist in Conversation | Rebecca Wickham

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Event artist

Rebecca Wickham

An Australian early-career photographer, Rebecca has recently graduated from London College of Communication with an MA (Distinction) in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. Her research-based practice sits between photography and other mediums, with work concerning the climate crisis and our relationship with the earth. Primarily focused on landscape, she is interested in the materiality of place, often working directly with the environment to bring a trace of its history and physicality into the work.

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Once Was :
Rebecca Wickham

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Once Was reflects on how we mourn more-than-human loss when what remains is only absence.

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