Jacqui Stockdale

Melbourne-based Jacqui Stockdale has created a series of eight photographs titled The Boho(2015) for Magic Object.  In this series Stockdale draws on the tales of Ned Kelly and Australia’s fascination with the famous bushranger. In each of the photographs, the artist has placed objects sourced from various souvenir shops in Glenrowan, a town known for the outlaws, the last stand and final capture.  Each item is placed in the hands of her subjects before she photographs them against a large hand-painted landscape. In Kelly (2015) the musician and performer Paul Kelly holds a green blood stained sash close to his body. The sash is a reference to the cummerbund that bushranger Kelly wore under his armour, after being awarded the item at age ten, from the parents of a young boy who he had saved from drowning. In his Magic Object catalogue essay writer Craig Judd suggests that the series ‘enhances the artist’s love affair with the souvenir, an object trinket or image to jog the memory, to take one back to (hopefully) that happy point of existence’. This potency of an object to evoke and yield an otherworldly power can be seen in the sash that Paul Kelly holds in his hands.

Jacqui Stockdale’s work is on display in Gallery 23 at the Art Gallery of South Australia during Magic Object.