LUCKY ROCKET:
Yani Clarke

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Yani Clarke, from the series LUCKY ROCKET, 2024, c-type print

When the Northern Rivers flooded in 2022, photographer Yani Clarke was thousands of kilometres away — heartbroken, watching the deluge unfold from a distance. It was the moment she knew she had to come home. After a decade of making work elsewhere, she returned to the region that raised her, beginning a slow reckoning with place, identity and belonging. LUCKY ROCKET emerges from this grounding — a work shaped by the ritual of return.

LUCKY ROCKET is a series of medium format photographs captured over two days, almost exactly ten years apart, at rocket festivals in Southeast Asia. The festival — Bun Bang Fai — is a pre-Buddhist rain-making ritual. Villages build rockets over nine metres long and launch them skyward to wake the clouds and remind the gods to keep their promise of rain. As Clarke notes, “In the era of the Billionaire Rocket Man, there’s something beautifully rebellious about communities launching rockets not to escape the earth, but to call the rain back down.”

Exhibition artist

Yani Clarke

Yani Clarke is a documentary art photographer based in Lismore, Northern Rivers, New South Wales, Australia, on Bundjalung Country. Her work focuses on uncovering raw, untold stories from society’s margins. Her photographs have been published in VICE, F-Stop Magazine, Empty Kingdom and Pearl Press. She has been a semi-finalist for the Head On Portrait Prize and the Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women, and has been nominated twice for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. In November 2025, Clarke held her first solo exhibition, presenting her series LUCKY ROCKET at Elevator ARI at Dumberimba/Lismore as part of the Head On Photo Festival Open Program. She is presently expanding a body of work centred on her hometown region, tracing recovery, ritual and the shifting edges of belonging.

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Photographer Yani Clarke in Lismore.

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