National Art School, Sydney Resident Genevieve Felix Reynolds (April – June 2026) reflects on her residency and her research at the BSR in a new blog.
A photograph is silent: its integral meaning is only what can be inferred by the viewer. Barthes describes this muteness as potentially tragic to some, and poetic to others. In books and museums, images are anchored by captions or catalogue entries, but I find these unable to fully account for the complexities they seek to contain, often revealing partial truths and unresolved residues.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the archives with early photographic collections of archaeological objects and architecture (in particular, Agnes and Dora Bulwer’s documentation of ancient Rome and its surrounds, and art historian Eugénie Strong’s carefully retouched documentation of sculptural fragments). I’ve looked at them for both what they record and for what they have become: physical objects generated by specific technologies and customs, often faded or foxed by time.
100 years ago, Aby Warburg proposed that the arrangement of images could be a form of knowledge itself, relationally and psychologically generative. Today, his Mnemosyne Atlas project feels like an ancestor to the screen. I’m interested in what happens when meaning is built from both combination and dissonance, as it is in psychological space, like memory, dreams, and (more often than not) online.
In Rome, this instinct is old and everywhere. The city is an archive full of archives: private and public museums, spolia, overbuilt churches, time-collaged floors. Piranesi and Panini impressed this upon their contemporaries via fantastical spaces and near boundless architecture.
My practice synthesises fragments in the same spirit, flattening images and artefacts into compositions where objects find meaning through proximity, disparity or isomorphic relationships. During my time here I’ve been expanding this collage approach into digital space using game design software. I’ve collected architectures built from marbles and patterns photographed in Rome, and I’m populating this with a borrowed collection of my own, assembled from photographs and 3D scans. The archives hold far more than a few months could exhaust, and every fragment I photograph or scan opens onto others, so the collection grows past any edge I try to set for it. I expect the material gathered here – images, marbles, patterns, scanned ruins – to feed my practice for many years.
Building a virtual space is an attempt to unfold my paintings and give them depth. The historical artefacts here are characterised by the errors of their medium: fragmented digitally as well as sculpturally. Navigated by a disembodied, floating viewer, space is limitless in a way that opposes the picture frame. Its contents are loosened in the same way: objects sit at impossible scales, hollow, doubled or weightless. RIP Piranesi – you would have loved video game space.
