Olive Cotton’s confident sense of design and balance was expressed across a wide range of subject types. Her daughter Sally McInerney is a superb photographer in her own right and it’s interesting to see the echos of her mother’s aesthetic sensibilities showing up in some of the images here.
Mother & Daughter: A Conversation
13-24 May 2014
Curated by Sandy Edwards of Arthere
Damien Minton Gallery
583 Elizabeth Street, Redfern, Sydney
www.damienmintongallery.com.au
Olive Cotton
Fairground Ride c1937/2008
Silver gelatin photograph, titled, dated and editioned in pencil by Cotton’s agent Josef Lebovic and signed in pencil by Cotton’s daughter Sally McInerney in authentication stamps verso, 22.7 x 20.6cm.
From an authorised edition of 90, commenced in 1999 and printed by photographer Roger Scott.
Sally McInerney
Carousel, 2010
Media Release
Two highly collectable and important Australian women photographers.
This is a historic exhibition of two notable Australian women photographers – Olive Cotton and Sally McInerney, mother and daughter – exhibiting together for the very first time.
This special selection of photographic works reveal the intimate interplay of the loves and believes of these two very special photographers – exploring influences, conversations, shared aesthetics and country places loved by both women.
Olive Cotton married renowned Australian photographer Max Dupain in 1939, having been great friends from childhood. Olive ran the Dupain Studio in Sydney during the early war years, receiving her own photographic commissions and enjoying a high profile for a woman photographer at that time.
Olive Cotton
Photographer’s Shadow
Max & Olive, 1935
Olive and Max separated after two years of marriage and Olive then remarried Ross McInerney, moving from the city to the farm Ross managed at Koorawatha, just outside Cowra.
This is the landscape Sally and her brother Peter then grew up in. Although Sally moved back to the city as a young woman, she would often visit her parents on the farm near Cowra. Nature features strongly in Sally’s images, as they do in her mother’s. As Curator Sandy Edwards says of Sally’s work, Sally ‘has a gift for finding the country in the city’.
Olive Cotton
Bright Cloud 1939/2008
Silver gelatin photograph, titled, dated and editioned in pencil by Cotton’s agent Josef Lebovic and
signed in pencil by Cotton’s daughter Sally McInerney in authentication stamps verso, 21 x 20.3cm.
From an authorised edition of 90, commenced in 1999 and printed by photographer Roger Scott.
Sally McInerney
Cloud Road, 2004
Sally McInerney was the winner of Sydney Life in 2012; winner of the Head On Photo Prise in 2006; and winner at age 16 of the Sydney Morning Herald High School Prize for best black and white print. She has been photographing since the age of eight when a great-aunt gave her the gift of a Box Brownie camera.
McInerney is an established and highly accomplished exhibiting photographic artist with seven solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions and publications to her credit.
See more images from the exhibition in Photo Review Mag app May 2014 issue.
To view more work of Sally McInerney visit www.sallymcinerney.com.
Olive Cotton is represented by Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney www.joseflebovicgallery.com.
Cassandra French, Pop-Up Publicity www.popupp.com.au.