Fine Art nominee

Offering a nuanced mix of hope and despair, promise and foreboding, this series of photographic vignettes was created during a lockdown reprieve in mid-2021, when Melbourne residents thought they were at last free from government restrictions. While invoking a sense of entrapment, this series invites the viewer to move beyond the darkness and towards the light.

Flowers emerging out of darkness, reminiscent of the Dutch masterpieces of the 17th century are a reminder of the transitory nature of everything. environment rapidly changes.

A level of poetic consciousness is required to navigate this new world and at times hopeless landscape. Orpheus was a poet, a prophet, and a musician in Greek mythology who at the end of his life worshipped no god but the sun.

For these images, I wanted Orpheus to be a woman who is glistening oracle-like, asleep on a dark sandscape. The viewer is invited to embrace their own mortality and energy for change simultaneously. To dare to be one’s own illumination—like a transient point of light in a night sky.”

Lilli Waters (born 1983, Armidale, NSW) is a fine arts photographer whose work explores the human condition through dramatic images of the female form in haunting, windswept landscapes. An ecological concern also finds expression in Waters’ underwater still life series which reference Northern Renaissance paintings in lighting and composition. Her underwater works feature live marine creatures amongst rocks, fruit, and flowers to evoke other-worldly landscapes with a palpable feeling of space and slowed time. Waters representations of luxuriant, yet fragile beauty are a reminder of the imminent loss of whole species and ecosystems as a result of climate change.

Lilli’s work has been exhibited to much acclaim in Italy, Germany, Japan, the UK, the US and Australia. Her images have appeared in publications around the globe. She was the winner of the Du Rietz Art Award (2021), and a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize (2021), Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Art (2021), Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2020), Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize (2020), Du Reitz Art Awards (2020), Percival Photographic Art Prize (2020), National Portrait Prize (2019), Australian Photography Awards (2018) and Art Aesthetica Art Award (2018).