Ongoing Practice

The artist’s practice is backgrounded by the harrowing experience of a shed fire on her parent’s property in Tasmania, 2018. Over forty years of objects, photographs, machinery, and heirlooms were rendered unrecognisable after an electrical fault ignited the blaze. Their destruction intensified the intangible quality of memory, underscoring the connection between personal history, material objects, and the image as archive.

In the aftermath of the fire, the artist salvaged rolls of analogue 35mm film from the rubble. Sifting through cracked and melted negatives became an overwhelming sensory experience: returning Dower to the devastation of what was once whole. The partially destroyed images, photographed by the artist’s parents while living between Sweden and the former Czechoslovakia, now sit between preservation and erasure. The physical damage embedded within the film carries traces of both familial memory and the environmental conditions that shaped its destruction.

Through scanning, cropping, enlargement, and sculptural installation, the remnants are translated into a reimagined visual archive. Dower’s practice is grounded in an indexical methodology, using materials that bear traces of lived experience. Themes of permanence, presence, and absence recur throughout the work, informed by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ and Susan Sontag’s notion of the photographic ‘trace’.

Self-portrait works extend this investigation through gestures of holding and being: using the body as a site through which familial and environmental histories are carried and reconfigured. Rendered as prints on aluminium, at times curved or obscured with semi-opaque layers, the works move through cycles of grief, reconciliation, and persistence. Abrasion, sanding, and erosion become physical process and metaphor. Through experimental photography and sculpture, Dower seeks cohesion within a desiccated familial archive, transforming trauma and loss into forms of intimacy, residue, and repair.