Just wanted you to know

Eliza Hutchison’s PHOTO 2021 commission as Photographer in Residence at the Parliament of Victoria examines the complex narrative forces of our political system. Experimental yet photojournalistic in approach, the work draws on broader personal and cultural narratives while exploring abstraction, photographic sequencing and sub-narratives as a personal yet political gesture.

Provided with direct access to the Parliament chambers, the Hansard media suite and committee meetings, Hutchison responds to the everyday activities of Parliament including debates on issues including safe injecting rooms, WorkCare, climate change, and mobile phone use in Victorian schools. In doing so, Hutchison examines Parliament as a corralling and mediating force of our collective experience and, structured around the artist’s daily communications, the work posits everyday lives in relation to the mechanism of their governance.

The commission offers an alternative vision of the processes and protocols of Victoria’s Parliament. Further, the work explores the idea of the diaristic through our digital trace and how our lives are constructed and remembered, recorded and captured through our devices. Sporadic, intuitive, dispersed, the work coalesces as a ‘photo-poem’ examining how our personal as well as political narratives are constructed, reconfigured and hybridised in the image saturated condition of our post-internet age.

Commissioned by Photo Australia and the Parliament of Victoria for PHOTO 2021