During the month of August, the Glow Winter Arts Festival sets the City of Stonnington awash in the illuminant wonder and immersive vibrancy of Melbourne’s finest creatives.
Photographer and artist James Voller has already had a busy this year, working on projects in Adelaide and Camberwell, but he’s been hard at work with a different and challenging project for Glow for the past few months – transforming Malvern Gardens into a magical, radiant village.
“With the change in methodologies and the different materials, I’m also changing how the work operates,” Voller says. “Usually, my work looks at everyday architecture and puts it back into the community, and this one’s turning that on its head and taking the everyday architecture you usually work with, but making these far more whimsical and enchanted. It takes it down the rabbit hole into a completely different world. It’s a lot more surreal than my other work. It’s been fun playing with the concept, as well as the form.”
Delighted to push his work in “weirder and stranger” directions, Voller’s Enchanted installation piece has been bubbling away for about two to three years. His very first submission into the Glow Winter Arts Festival represented an ideal catalyst to consolidate abstract ideas into a great project, with months of shooting, printing and colour tech emerging into a glowing green wonderland.
“I’m very fortunate to get this opportunity to do something so experimental and different,” Voller says. “The council’s been super supportive and helpful as well. I can’t wait to see the audience’s reaction to it, because I haven’t seen anything like this done before. It should be a really good chance for people to look at Melbourne in a different way.”
Originally from Christchurch, New Zealand, Voller honed his craft in a “very traditional” documentary-photography undergrad degree, discovering an attraction to the form’s potential for re-seeing the unseen.
“When I started doing stranger things with my photography – like taking photographs of rubbish bins, or toilet blocks – your target is to get a completely different reading. I guess it was when I first started putting photographs back into the public, rather than just taking photographs and making a book or something. That’s fine, and a lot people make amazing work, but for me, I just needed to put the photographs back out into the public.”
In Voller’s mind, the future is bright for festivals such as Glow and the expansion of installation art’s potential. Now running an arts company dedicated to getting new and emerging artists into their first public spaces, Voller is excited by the possibilities of fresh technology and an ever-widening audience to inspire and thrill. It’s been a huge journey since those early beginnings, but infinitely rewarding.
“In 2008, when I wasn’t getting funded, I was doing them illegally,” Voller recalls some early installation ventures. “I was just using flour, paste and bits of laser paper to make these installations. Totally illegal, but then one day the cops caught up with me. Instead of telling me off, they were like, ‘That looks great. Keep going, keep doing it’. That was a pretty good moment in installation: when you realise that a cross-section of people were enjoying them, rather than just my crew. That was a good moment.
“Some other great moments have been having my old lecturer from New Zealand sitting on the tram I did for Melbourne Festival a few years ago, and then realising he was sitting on one of my big works, and seeing that photography can be more than documentary stuff. He got something out of it as well. That was a nice moment.”
