Bedside Table - Documentary iPhoneography

Bedside Table - Documentary iPhoneography

BEDSIDE TABLE  2013-2023

Bedside Table is immersive iPhoneography based installation exploring self-portraiture through Observational Documentation of a bedside table captured on a daily and weekly basis over a 10 year period. 

The presentation shares the relationship of physical absence while engaging an embodied presence created with the intimacy and immediacy of shooting with an iPhone-camera. Bedside Table is a story of female identity through place, memory and exploration of body as transmitter and site.

Captured with iPhone series 3, 5 7,9 and 13, the images had formed the basis of early research in a PhD program. The expansive collection of numerous images was collated through the timeline of capture and developed through Practice Led Research to formulate narratives based on luminal and clustered interpretations of conversations of investigating social ritual and memory. 

The research is an investigation of where iPhoneography portraiture transitions, dissects, and extends a landscape of new photo-media possibilities. The images share in the cultural and universal recordings of intimate and common objects, patterns, and repetitious positioning of the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of life.  

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BEDSIDE TABLE is a series of Documentary iPhoneography making up to 10 varying formats including video, alumalux, textile and archival printed works on Canson Rag in an exhibition which has been presented in several iterations within Australia and Auckland, New Zealand since 2019. 

Cups, a lamp, a partners whiskey glass, food, spectacles, condom wrappers, tissues, magazines, used mugs, my current read, his watch, underwear, fallen petals…the everyday and the ordinary are evocative and challenge Martin’s desire for self-protection and preservation. It is vulnerable, personal, universal, uncomfortable, and mundane.

“…When are we ever ready to have our personal, private, ordinary every day and sometimes delicate secrets of pleasure, pain, and memories to be on display?  These daily and raw photos of bedside tablesreveal a little and too much for, and of, me to be comfortable.”

Martin has roamed within the world of documentation and candid display since she shot her first images during the Anti-apartheid riots in South Africa in 1984. It was the launch of her first exhibition ‘Blind Spots’ in support of her passion for Human rights in 1986, with a sellout show at King Street Gallery and an Australia Council project grant following soon after, which established her work in Sydney and Perth.

Now more than 20 years later Martin continues to document contemporary events acting as a conduit between the artwork and the public to open a platform of discussion, whether it be the environment, women’s rights, mental illness or with her passion to support worthwhile causes like the Dr Fiona Woods fundraiser after the Bali bombing, Martin always extends the boundaries of her work.

In Bedside Table Martin turns the iPhone on herself although her portraiture is faceless the intimacy of the objects find a subjective and social communication which will wear the test of time

Small and unframed the work is about the seconds captured on her iPhone - a personal, physical, and psychological investigation about what it’s like to be human- to see the ordinary as extraordinary and then to normalize it.